good point, although it would have been nicer on their part to leave people alone given that they get money for service, unlike google. But when it comes to browser extensions the question of “what is intermediary and what is just an incidental plugin” is pretty murky. Is Firefox Scrapbook extension an “intermediary”? Or a hypothetical extension that keeps track of your manually input queries for display in an unrelated user interface? I doubt that an airtight license could be written against all possible implementations of things like that, or even if it could be that they would want to look like openly waging war on progress in their field. Why not just hand out their own branded clone instead.
maybe, but that sounds like delegating work in entirety. The history of progress is history of increasing division of labor into fine grained operations - this increases labor productivity and reduces wages.
Which is exactly what law firms don’t want. There’s a good reason why many law firms allow only high billers (i.e., not legal assistants or secretaries) to use services like Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw.
ascenray, could you please clarify why only high billers should use Lexis Nexis? Are they afraid that the client will not like paying for searches made by allegedly less than ideal employees? (In which case the problem might be averted by not delegating the “run query” operation to them). Or are there other issues at work here?
Also, how can all law firms simultaneously be loyal to some pretty dubious outdated principle of price setting? Why don’t some law firms break out of the mold and advertise the fact that they charge less by being more efficient, in order to capture a large share of depression-time market?
I used to work for LexisNexis about ten years ago (never had anything to do with the search function, though). I’ll just say, it’s amusing to see how many different ways “LexisNexis” has been written and spelled in this thread, because that was a big issue for us at the time, and apparently their attempts at branding haven’t been that successful.
I’m speaking in broad terms, obviously, but law firms, particularly the kinds of law firms that have deep-pocket clients, work under a general environment that encourages the idea that legal services should be expensive. It plays to the kind of thinking that suggests to people that a high price implies high quality. Law firms tend not to break out of this mold because, generally speaking, it’s not in any lawyer’s interest to prove to clients that their work can be done at a lower price. What large law firms much prefer to do is to bill high numbers and then offer “discounts” to clients that complain.
As far as who gets to use legal research services – they’re expensive. To some extent, law firms don’t want to trust low-billing staff members with the ability to ring up large bills. There’s a tendency to believe that a senior person is much more able to justify racking up high expenses than a junior person is. Also, there’s a constant struggle in law firms between attorneys and paralegals over billing. Attorneys work at higher billing rates and they don’t want to give more billing opportunities to low-billing paralegals. By billing high and large, they prove their worth to the firm, and also to the clients. They don’t want to give clients the idea that things that they consider the meat of legal practice – like legal research – can be entrusted to low billers.
how about the case of lawyers employed by corporations or government agencies? Are legal departments that are not part of a “law firm” more honest and efficient with the way they do and bill their work?
so does this make them more likely to subdivide their work and farm it out to paralegals? For that matter, are there more paralegals per lawyer in legal departments as opposed to law firms?
That I can’t answer with much confidence. From what little I know about government work, legal work is done by lawyers. And most companies don’t have huge legal departments, so their in-house lawyers out-source the bulk of legal work to law firms. I don’t really know anything about how large in-house legal departments work.
There is also an issue that people who are not licensed to practice law can’t practice law. There is probably a grey area here, but I think most lawyers would be of the opinion that doing legal research constitutes practicing law. This is also a reason to limit the use of Westlaw and Lexis by non-lawyers.
I’ve worked at a large law firm and in the legal dept of a large corp (albeit briefly on both accounts). The corp definitely had less paralegals per attorney than the firm. Pretty crappy sample size though
do people passing the bar make a blood oath about this while lying in a coffin? Or will you be disbarred if it turns out that a non-lawyer in your organization did some legal research at your behest?
What if some action related to LexisNexis happened at your behest but you are not quite sure if the guy involved was actually a lawyer since you never met him?
How about outsourced legal services firms abroad, let’s say in India, are they also very faithful to the lawyer’s creed in this regard?
Not only could you be disbarred, but there’s also the possibility of criminal charges.
Relying on work whose provenance you aren’t sure of is malpractice.
I’ve never heard of a jurisdiction that allows the unlicensed practice of law. Some support functions might bs outsourced, but I’d be very surprised to hear of a firm that outsourced actual legal work to people unlicensed in the relevant jurisdiction.
Yes. The key words for this kind of stuff are NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Ontologies
There are all kinds of really cool search technologies out there for different industries. For example, what if the aforementioned scientist is looking not only for drugs, but for those that have a benzene ring and a methyl group hanging off of them. It’s trivial these days for a chemist to draw a fancy structure and perform a Sub Structure Search in a chemistry database to find compounds that share the same middle part.
You can even do similarity searching, submitting a drawing of a caffeine molecule and quickly finding thousands of very similar molecules.
The tool I was involved with combined chemical searching with ontologies and the like to produce quite a powerful search tool for toxicology data.
In addition, so far as I know, all U.S. States prohibit lawyers to practice law in an organization not run by lawyers. Large accounting/consulting firms hate this because they would like to bs able to offer one-stop-shopping professional services.
I am missing something here… Why is this a universal law (at least in the US)? What is the motivation behind such a restriction? And how does this affect the legal department in larger non-law-related organizations?
I forgot to specify that thus rule applies to the provision of legal services to third parties. Among other things, it is believed that answering to a person who doesn’t have the training as well as the ethical obligations of a licensed lawyer can be corrupted by non-law-profession-based motivations.
A person can do legal research and provide it to a licensed attorney within his own firm, who may then do whatever he likes with it (this is how it works for interns, people with out of state licensing, people who failed the bar the first time around, etc.). ‘Practicing law’ basically amounts to providing legal work to a client, signing legal documents, appearing in court, etc.
I can work at a law firm, write a brief for court, give it to an attorney, and then he can review it, edit it, and present it the court as his own work. If it’s wrong, it’s his license / reputation on the line.
The same thing applies to large corporations - especially when you have a company that is involved in lot of policy cases - much of the work is actually done by policy wonks, and then submitted by lawyers.
This is absolutely true. Anyone can work under supervision of an attorney. However, if there is an error, such as an error in legal research that constitutes malpractice, the attorney who supervised is responsible 100%.
What this means, in effect, that if you take legal research from a person upon whose research and analytical skills you do not place great confidence, you end up redoing the work entirely. That doesn’t save time, and it’s a waste of money.
Also, a great many people use Lexis/Westlaw on a flat fee basis. I work in a government office and we don’t pay by the search, we pay a flat fee for X number of users, unlimited use. I’m not sure if even large law firms pay on a per-search basis anymore. I would find it strange if clients who were so much bigger than we are, pay far more for their service. I suspect it’s a bit of a convenient fiction for them.
code-grey there are economies that may seem backwards to you. You are thinking that a client would automatically desire the least expensive research operator. They don’t. They desire the most proficient research operator. In 2009, it was legal news that some clients were refusing to pay for any work done by associates in their first year. They felt they were paying for work by someone who was essentially untrained.
(cite: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/career/markettrends/ go down to the subhead “looking ahead”: 47% of 208 firms surveyed in 2009 reported they have had clients refuse to pay for work done by first-year associates.)
