Second Opinions

A California Lawyer Asks: How Can I Best Organize and Leverage My Legal Research?

By Nina Cunningham

ORGANIZING LEGAL research today is not much different conceptually than it ever was. However, the expectations for making research both accessible and usable have changed enormously, as have the tools to give research long-term usefulness.

We are now capable of sophisticated knowledge management, the high end of the ladder of organization tools. With it comes automated research, retrieval and organization. The technology escapes the average user, so a personal connection with the process is removed. Some of the best tools require so much specialized intervention that the learning curve itself becomes a barrier to the organization process. At this point is important to consider the objectives for saving what we learn.

Employing some strategy in choosing a research and organization tool would help achieve results in choosing a tool. Will it be used personally or by the firm? What is the size of the firm? The budget for investment in new technology? What type of repository is envisioned for the information? Who will have access to it? The depth and breadth of the archive?

The magnitude of internal and external documents being dealt with? Are we concerned with automating research or just storing our results? Should we store all the results or only some of it? Retrieval and reuse are the active reasons for organizing information. Institutional memory is the passive one. Is there potential for long-term value in the research results? Are there opportunities for eliminating future rework if similar projects are encountered?

Simplicity

The organizing process can be quite simple, beginning with a flat field bibliographic record of resources searched, with a brief description and identification numbers for indexing purposes. This increases the long-term value of every component of a research project, improving productivity along the way. Productivity is improved greatly even if research has to be updated to make it current, or to conform to new a different set of facts. It is important that the record of research capture the process as well as the product to increase the value of the results.

The old-fashioned database on index cards is a good first model for tracking research results. An index card that summarizes the case, issues, and detailed description of the research process and its results is a fundamental model. A useful research organization tool must reflect the needs of both current and potential users. This means that the databases recovering only bibliographic information are designed to retrieve references. While it may be suitable for use by a research and reference group, and it may serve the purposes of a group charged with this ongoing challenge, but will not answer questions of business intelligence. Depending on the goals and requirements, we can find tools for searching, gathering, and indexing data from various sources with the help of a panoply of information management software tools.

Bibliographic management software includes a number of popular products that work with word processing programs, organize references in a database, and create bibliographies automatically. These include several that work with BookWhere 2000, a powerful software package that runs on MS Windows and permits a user to search remote libraries for published information of interest, with a pre-configured list of available library hosts and databases.

Compatible with BookWhere and available for the legal market, Legal Citation's note forms are an example of a high-end index card system. Each note record has a field for keywords, an "access phrase" and a reference field. This is a useful product if you do a lot of research that includes notes that ultimately need organizing. The notes are standardized by restricting the notecards to specific data. But the notecard form can be used to organize all sorts of notes, including meeting notes, phone conversations, and deposition transcripts.

Internet

A researcher can use the Internet for potential sources using BookWhere as a search and retrieval program. As potential sources are located, they can be added as records into Legal Citation. The references serve as a reading list until note records are added, often with excerpts from the research results themselves. With sources that display the full text of cases and articles, such as LEXIS, excerpts applicable to the problem-solving situation can be taken from the browser and pasted into the "excerpt" field of the Citation note record. Citation note records can be printed and used as notecards.

BookWhere 2000 also is compatible with two of the more popular products in the bibliographic management genre. One is Reference Manager, used in the sciences; the other is ProCite, a more general purpose reference management package. EndNote performs the same functions and is used widely in the production of manuscripts for publishing in the sciences. These packages allow a search of the BookWhere libraries, organize the bibliographic results of the search, and automate the production of a bibliography.

Many lawyers now find that they can make excellent use of database management tools to organize research and track documents in a case. Databases serve as productivity tools in documenting processes, organizing related documents, and sorting types of information that ultimately can be useful in future matters or cases with similar issues properly designed database can index events and documents in a case and assist a lawyer in getting a global view of the case and where it is going. It can also be used to organize research, keep track of collections, or manage lists of clients, parties, or experts.

Microsoft Access is one off-the-shelf database management system commonly available. Paradox comes packaged with Corel's WordPerfect Suite; FileMaker Pro from Filemaker; and Lotus Notes are all still widely used in law firms. For those who remember, dBASE is still here, now in dBASE 2000 format.

While somewhat more sophisticated in their ability to relate and organize material than bibliographic systems, they do not automatically search and retrieve from internal and external sources. These databases depend on direct user input, but they come with wizards and templates to guide database creation and make the organization of documents and research results systematic and easy to set up. The learning curve toward competent use of databases leads to an appreciation of more sophisticate information management tools.

Several products for organizing Internet research have been designed to tame the chaotic beast. MeltingPoint is an Internet legal research organizer that hit the market in about 1997.

It works in concert with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator both as a collector of links and a relational database that could be further linked with case documents and data imported from other databases. Similarly, but not restricted to the legal marketplace, Webforia Organizer and KeeBoo organize Internet references and permit systematic storage and retrieval.

KeeBoo is available as a free download that helps users save entire Web pages to the hard drive and compile them into books, with a booklike interface. Image files and text documents can be saved and integrated as well.

Webforia Organizer allows users to save an entire page or highlighted text while browsing, and has additional features for storing and annotating saved Web Pages.

KeeBoo, like Webforia, allows exporting of an HTML version.

As a free download, KeeBoo goes a long way to help lawyers and other researchers experiment with basic research organization tools. Webforia comes closer to being a customizable system.

High End

High end Web-based database systems such as Cold Fusion and other advanced databases that incorporate personal information managers will be the next wave of software solutions, and will replace simple database structures.

They will be powerful and flexible, like Think Tool Pro, and will incorporate relational database technology and the ability to store complex multimedia.

Ultimately, Web-based "enterprise information portals" will be available, and present personalized data storage systems via the Internet, at a low cost or, possibly, no cost at all.

The organization of research results continues to require user involvement. Results still have to be checked for relevancy and deposited for safekeeping in a repository somewhere and within an index or organizational scheme that assures retrieval.

At this time, sophistication increases the price tag. However, customer demand will influence the development of information storage and retrieval systems that allow ease of access, speed of access, simplicity in presentation, a transparent interface, and depth of information.

Nina Cunningham, based in Chicago, is president and CEO of Quidlibet Research, Inc., a strategic planning consulting firm specializing in knowledge management and the re-engineering of law firm libraries and research centers.