Section Twelve

12.1 Kuhlthau, C.C., Tama, S.L. (2001). Information Search Process of Lawyers: A Call for 'Just for Me' Information Services. Journal of Documentation 57(1), 25-43.

My senior year of high school, I worked as a receptionist in a very small law office. One of my responsibilities was to take closed files and box them according to their closing number and then place them in cardboard filing cabinets. These then went into the dingy basement that smelled too moist to be the home of hundreds of precious legal documents. And sure enough, one day the basement flooded and scores of files were lost to a watery and ink-smeared grave. Gone were several previous cases that could have provided more information to Mr. Miller in his subsequent cases. I open with this anecdote because the entire time I read the article, I imagined Mr. Miller and his extreme aversion to technology. Not that the office lacked computers, I even had a popular model for computers right at my desk. Did I mention it was popular during 1994?

The lawyers interviewed for this article definitely remind me of my former boss, as they too hoard all sorts of information that might be useful one day. And while they have all the information they might possibly need, there is no uniform way of cultivating this, as documented by the authors' findings. I wonder if this is necessarily still true, as these interviews were conducted in 2001. With technology on the rise and Web 2.0 taking over, I am uncertain that there is not at least one database that can help the lawyers find exactly what they are looking for. As this is related to technology, it is something that should be revisited at least every three years to provide the most accurate results.

In my Principles of Searching class, we discussed how lawyers would be more inclined to sift through a bigger pool of information in order to get the highest recall and ultimately "the smoking gun" that could win the case. However, some of the lawyers interviewed would rather have a smaller, more precise results instead. I would imagine that a more efficient search engine could improve the precision without losing the obscure, but probably most relevant results.