Ditto in England thanks to Westlaw. But it is i) Very expensive and ii) not user friendly at all. It seems to be designed with making life miserable.
For the record most of my work is done online. But there is a small but still significant amount which is done using paper resources.
And finally it should be pointed out that many older firms have had these reporters for years, my chamber got its version of the All England Reports back in 1931, when we were formed so well we need to upkeep it as its there.
Just an aside, all research my first semester 1L year had to be done with the books and reporters. Our Westlaw accounts were inaccessible until the 2nd semester. A fair portion of my legal research & writing course that semester dealt with the use of treatises, reporters, keycites and all that jazz. I guess, their theory was that if you ever found yourself working for a firm that didn’t have a Westlaw or Lexis account, you would at least have some background with the books and not being completely clueless. So at least, one law school out there is still teaching the old method to their students.
There are prop companies that sell fake props - hollow cardboard or plastic molds, usually - that are designed to look just like the real thing from certain angles. Computer monitors (the CRT type) and books are particularly popular for this kind of thing because it saves the prop people from having to move hundreds of pounds of gear when they get the set ready.
I would not be surprised if the TV lawyers were using props for the commercials and therefore, they may be giving the impression TV viewers expect rather than anything that matches how it’s really done.
I learned how to use the bound reporters, and the other printed resources in a law library; but like many others, I do most of my research online. Still, knowing how to use the physical library has proven valuable when what I’m looking for hasn’t been put online, as Malthus notes.
I work at a large law firm and a friend of mine is a criminal defense attorney (private practice). He bought a few yards of old books from one of our offices (we still have a big library), just so his office would look “lawyerly”. As far as I know he does most of his research online.
Are you saying your online sources don’t replicate the pagination of the original? How annoying!
There’s a few print sources I use regularly – mostly treatises or statutory compilations – even though they’re on line as well, it’s easier to browse and page around the print copy. You’ll get my bound “Siegel’s New York Practice” from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. But it’s only one volume. I’d have to buy 20 copies to have an impressive shelf-full.
I work for a non-profit. I don’t remember the last time we received any updates for our case law books. We do still keep hard copies of the statutes, and update them with pocket parts regularly. We also get hard copies of the Rules–civil procedure, evidence, stuff like that.
Frankly, there’s not a huge amount of research to do in my main practice areas. Annual CLE requirements serve to keep us aware of any major changes, otherwise family law is pretty well settled. I know what evidence is needed for a divorce, custody, restraining order, stuff like that. Lately, I’ve been doing some administrative law…including appealing agency decisions to a trial court, and one to the Court of Appeals. Those take lots of research, and I generally don’t even consider using books for that. Fire up Lexis and run searches in the appropriate databases…we have a flat rate plan with our state and federal cases and codes.
I think the day of the Digest or other “practioner’s texts” as AK84 mentioned, has largely come and gone. The purpose of that sort of thing is to lead you to cases. Not really necessary when I can use boolean search logic to find the same cases faster…and instantly know if the case I’m looking at has been overturned, criticized, cited, etc.
This one time, in law school (not band camp), I grabbed a random old dusty lawbook from a shelf of about a hundred such books and flipped through the pages. Out fell a black-and-white picture of a butt-nekkid lady grooming herself in a personal area. I’ve wondered forever who put that there (and when).
Not sure exactly what you are putting in the category of “practitioner’s texts,” but tax lawyers use treatises or online tax-only services all the time.
yeah, we didn’t have Westlaw when I went to lawschool. So get off my lawn already.
(actually, it was officially invented by then–1984–but no one outside of the biggest and most expensive firms used it iirc). Now we have unlimited Westlaw for a flat rate that covers every state and fedaral case in the US and tons of other stuff. On the rare occasion something is outside our plan, I just pay a few bucks extra and get it. In fact, right now I have it open in another window and I don’t even have to worry about the meter ticking away. Quite a change from only a few years ago. I remember quite well how to research the old way, and I don’t miss it a bit. I can accomplish in 10 minutes what used to take several hours. (and probably get better results).
This is more-or-less tangential, but I’ve been to at least one restaurant that had real books on shelves around the dining area. It was in a hotel (the only place you’ll find a ‘nice’ restaurant in some towns is in a hotel) so presumably they were for the benefit of guests, but I wonder what guest in a late 1990s hotel in Worthington, MN would want an early 1960s FORTRAN textbook.
There were a number of companies that specialized in selling used sets of legal volumes for actual use. You could save a substantial amount of money that way. For example, 10 years ago I purchased the 80-volume NYCRR for $450 (including updates to the date of purchase) where the publisher wanted $2500 for the same set. The set I received was actually unused. Which was kind of annoying, as it took a week or so off-and-on to get all of the updates applied.
I just looked at that company’s web site and these days they seem to specialize in antique volumes and reprints, though they do list a few used sets of current/near-current volumes.
I’m sure no one misses Shepardizing by hand, but it’s a bit of a problem for those of us without subscriptions. I can visit a nearby law school to do research in actual books, but without a student account can’t just sit down and log in to a Westlaw terminal.
I still use books occasionally. The problem with online services is that texts are usually laid out in an order with a chapters that might deal with a primary principle, then chapters that deal seriatum with exceptions to that principle and so on. It is much harder to appreciate the overarching structure of a text in an online version, and if you don’t, you can too easily take things out of context.
Secondly, in law (even in narrow fields like mine - crime) there are expressions that sometimes have narrow technical applicability and other times have an ordinary, common (and wide) usage. For example, the concept of “unfairness” can have a particular narrow use in the law relating to the exclusion of confessions. But if you try to search for “unfairness”, you will return a bajillion hits that have nothing to do with that. And narrowing the search parameters can be fraught with the peril of constructing the question in such a way as to inadvertently exclude something important.
Lastly, old-fashioned indexes are a useful resource. Volumes of law reports have an index at the end of each volume, which are typically accumulated every few years or so into a stand alone bound volume. The fact that a human mind has addressed the significance of cases and extracted their importance for the purpose of creating an index is often somehow better than doing a crude word search. I have found cases that way when database searches failed in the way database searches typically do - nothing returned, or far too much returned.
We do have practitioner’s texts, and in California at least, we use them pretty frequently. We use the Rutter Guides extensively, and there are different sets for civil and criminal procedure, appellate procedure, family law, estate/probate, etc. We also have Witkin, who knows all about all. Then, if desparate and a scattershot Westlaw search has not helped, we have Am Jur and Cal Jur, which in my experience are less useful.
But I also understand that California is very different from other states (in more ways than one), but particularly in that California is a very statutory state. Most everything has a statute or three, so finding the statute is usually the first thing to do, and Rutter, Witkin and CalJur are really helpful in doing so. And I prefer to use them in book form rather than online form, because they’re easier to flip through if you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking for. But once I’ve found my hook into the research, I prefer to run it down online because that’s faster.
With respect to the OP, I think few places maintain the books anymore, because it’s just so expensive, in terms of space to house the books, cost of books vs. online services, and cost of lawyer time to use the books. But one time a partner did go down to look at the defunct books because he didn’t like the results of my research. He triumphantly brought me back a case that absolutely destroyed all my research results and I was mortified. Until I shepardized the case and realized that it had been overturned, and then had the gleeful pleasure of trotting that down to his office and explaining that the books in the library weren’t updated.
I would respectfully disagree - it depends on the type of research I’m doing.
If it’s an area that I know well, then I agree with you that going straight to case searches and “statutes cited” searches is the way to go - all I’m doing is updating myself on an area that I’m already familiar with.
However, if it’s an area that I’m not familiar with, texts and articles are a better starting point - I need to get the overview before I start drilling down into the details of the cases.
