Electronic Legal Research
The journal article, “Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring the Influence of Legal Research Medium,” written by Stefan Krieger and Fischer Kuh provide results of an empirical study that compare legal research process using electronic and print sources. The research question in this article is whether the shift to electronic legal research may have significant impacts on the research outcomes and legal reasoning. The authors hypothesized that there are differences between print and electronic research processes, where electronic legal research medium radically changes how attorneys and law students discover and encounter law. Stefan H. Krieger and Katrina Fischer Kuh, Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring the Influence of Legal Research Medium, 16 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 757 (2014). According to the study, comparison confirmed the hypothesis and revealed substantial differences between using print and electronic media when conducting electronic media.
The authors argued that the breadth and extent of the observed differences suggested that the research medium broadly influenced legal reasoning strategies and research outcomes, mainly when considered based on the interconnection between analysis, reasoning and sound legal research. Ibid, at 788. The study suggests that legal research need a combination of “factual knowledge and higher-level intelligence,” which enable researchers to notice various analogies and construct abstract conceptual legal frameworks. Ibid, at 788. The article used different evidence to support its arguments, such as the American Bar Association and previous studies. American Bar Association, 2012-2013 ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools Standard 302(a)(2) (2012); Barbara Bintliff, From Creativity to Computerese: Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Computer Age, 88 Law Libr. J. 338, 340-41 (1996).
Researchers discovered that well-informed predictions about the impacts of electronic research typically suffers from “credibility gap,” primarily due to lack of objective evidence that such research may change research outcomes, legal reasoning and research processes. Ibid, at 760. The study also supports the legal community, including law students and attorneys, to understand different potential effects of the changing environment of legal research. It concludes by recommending further research to examine particular predictions that precedent scholars have provided, primarily regarding the significant impacts associated with the shift to electronic legal research.