Navigating Legal Reference Questions Without a Legal Background

In the days leading up to my first day working at the Thurgood Marshall State Law Library (TMSLL), I was most worried about understanding and answering questions from legal professionals. They went to law school and are coming to ME for legal research help?? I have no legal background and felt an overwhelming bout of imposter syndrome.

TMSLL gets a lot of email reference questions, so we often correspond through our reference request management system called RefTracker. Once we draft a response to patrons, it goes through a second review before being sent to the patron.

If you’re new to Law Library Land, don’t fret! I started at 0 and am learning every day. The biggest lessons I’ve learned are to be patient, pursue learning opportunities, and never be afraid to ask for help.

How to Ask for Help with Confidence

While you can read all the textbooks in the world and take hours of trainings, nothing is more valuable than learning on the job. If a question comes up and a voice in your head says, “That question is way too hard; let’s find an easier one!” it may be the perfect opportunity to try it out if you are feeling up for it. I am lucky that my colleagues are willing to help me when I encounter challenging reference questions.

I try to always be transparent and clear when asking for help. I’ll say something along the lines of: “I’ve never encountered a question like this one. I’d like to try to answer it, but I may need some help – is it okay if I ask for your feedback as I work through it?” or “I feel stuck, how would you approach this question?”

Depending on what system your library uses for reference questions, I find a lot of value in what I affectionately refer to as the “graveyard,” which is comprised of past messages the library has received with our replies. The graveyard is searchable and is a great source when I am having trouble starting a draft.

Be Resourceful

Resources are your best friend. Depending on how you learn best, publications can be helpful to provide something beside you as you conduct legal research. If you are an auditory/visual learner, you may wish to seek out webinars or in-person training opportunities.

Helpful Publications/Websites:

• Research Guides – Thurgood Marshall State Law Library (TMSLL)
• Maryland Public Library Toolkit – TMSLL
• Legal Research Guides – University of Maryland
• Research Guides – Library of Congress
• American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Member Libraries – AALL

Helpful Trainings:

• Law on the Frontlines: Legal Reference for Public Libraries – TMSLL
• Civil Legal Justice: The Crucial Role of Libraries – Webjunction
• Libraries Prepare to Answer Civil Legal Questions in Times of Crisis – Webjunction
• Understanding Eviction and How Libraries Can Help – Webjunction
• U.S. Law Webinars – Library of Congress

In addition, be sure to keep in mind local organizations that specialize in assisting the public with legal issues.

Take Care of You

As librarians, we are often the ones the public turns to when they’ve exhausted their options. We see people at their worst with little to no understanding of the law and/or court procedures.

If you feel like you’ve used your entire brain after a day of law “librarian-ing,” be sure to take some time to take care of yourself to recharge. Get some fresh air, stare into the void, do anything/everything that makes you feel happy.

We can do it!

The “Why” of Learning Legal Research

Why?  Any parent cringes at that word – all those tries to explain to a toddler the “why” then be met only by another “why”….over and over.  Try explaining to a stubborn tween “why” they need to wear a bike helmet or go to bed at a decent hour.  But maybe these kids are onto something with all the “why.”  Just look at education theory.

Why did I start thinking about this topic?  I am currently designing an International and Foreign Legal Research course for fall 2024 which I will teach for the first time.  Going through the process of getting my course organized got me thinking about the “Why” of legal research.   How can I tie the research skills I will cover to what students need in law school and beyond?

I could not help but think back to what a student in my Advanced Legal Research class last year told me – a friend commented to her – Why are you taking ALR?  You won’t have to do research as a lawyer.  Ugh.  How do you combat this attitude?  And demonstrate the value of learning research to law students?

After doing a bit of research on the topic, I saw that many experts in education theory point out that learning happens when you show why that learning is important.  For example, when the instructor can show the students the personal relevance of the material they are teaching.  (See Making Learning Personally Meaningful: A New Framework for Relevance Research).

Additionally, this Gen X instructor found the section of OK, Zoomer: Teaching Legal Research to Gen Z, (at page 293) particularly relevant: “Explain How Each Skill, Topic or Resource will be Used in Legal Practice.”

So, I saw that I need to tie the legal research skills and topics I am teaching to the students’ personal goals, to their success in legal practice.  While technology is always changing, and Large Language Models (LLMs) are now entering into legal research, robust and efficient legal research skills remain vital in legal practice.

Now that I have (hopefully) shown you the value of “Why” when teaching, what are some ideas to get there?

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Here are some tactics I have tried:

• Experience: Talk about the students’ experience with legal research on the job so far: What was useful? Did they encounter any difficulties or challenges?  In my Advanced Legal Research course, I typically distribute a survey about student research experience as pre-work for the first class meeting.  As a follow up, we have an in-class discussion about students’ successes and challenges.  Reflecting on their own experience with legal research and hearing from their peers helps tie ALR’s content to real legal practice.
• Cost: I always talk about the cost of legal research, as well as the value of the students’ time when they become a billing attorney.  Even if the research resource is free, an attorney’s time is not.  Students need to be efficient with their time as well as with any database charges.  Students sometimes think that if a database is not charged back, it does not matter how long they are searching.  But it does. I try to impress the value of learning efficient and effective legal research strategies that work across platforms and legal practice areas.  In the case of legal practice, time really is money.
• Employers: Let the hiring partners speak.  I use some charts from legal industry reports to demonstrate that the materials or topics we cover in class are important in practice, according to actual lawyers at law firms.  I like to show infographics from the Bloomberg Law School Preparedness Report  2022 (see page 4) to illustrate use of various legal research sources by attorneys in practice such as administrative sources, practice guides and general search engines.  Show the students that lawyers do use legal research tools in practice.
• The Real World: I talk about my experience working with summer and new associates, and that they do in fact conduct quite a bit of research. Drawing on my experience as a law librarian at a large law firm, I explain how you can leverage the law library and librarians at the firm.  Consider asking law firm librarians you know to weigh in and maybe even make a class visit.  According to the Bloomberg Law School Preparedness Survey 2023 (at page 8), over half of law students have never consulted a law librarian.  I emphasize to the students to get in the habit in law school of leveraging this free resource which can help them be more efficient with their time.  When they enter practice, their law firm librarians know a lot about the firm’s practice areas and even about each partner’s preferred legal research resources.  If you leverage law librarians as a resource, you are already ahead of the majority of your peers.  At law school as well as in practice, it only makes sense to contact the librarian experts.
• Engage: This great article Engaging Students on the First Day and Every Day by Michael Roberto gives more tips on how to engage students in the classroom.  Tip #3 ties into explaining the “why,” which the author refers to as the “so what”: Articulating the “so what?” before you hand out an assignment—and including compelling examples that reinforce the subject’s relevance—motivates students to do the work well, not just for the grade.

For most law librarians, explaining the “why” of learning legal research is not too tough.  As a group, we believe in the value of the legal research skills we teach.  So, let’s share the “why.”  What have you tried to help students see the “why” of learning legal research?

Lessons from Student Feedback

Law students are preparing to storm the law school exits and rush off to their exciting jobs and externships all over the world. Before they go, some students take the time to fill out the online “Student Ratings” forms about our teaching. I look forward to reviewing those ratings after every semester, but I have been surprised both by negative and even positive comments that seemingly has come out of the blue. I have also been disappointed by the lack of constructive feedback from students. Here are my thoughts on student feedback and tips on eliciting constructive comments from students.

Over the years, I have learned the following from student feedback:

1. Expect different feedback styles from international students versus U.S. students. International students tend to be more respectful and less specific in their comments. This results in feedback that is positive but not helpful for improving teaching. U.S. students tend to be more blunt and specific but not always realistic in their expectations for a course.
2. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Between my Canvas page, informational slides at the beginning and end of each class session, and emails I send out to students, I think I do a good job of keeping my classes informed. But no matter how many times I tell students something, someone has missed the information. Students appreciate almost tedious levels of communication, and it reflects well on feedback forms.
3. Manage student expectations by overplaying the difficulty of assignments and grading. Once I made the mistake of telling students that the final exam was straight-forward, and they could all do well on the exam if they studied the material from the slides and the review sessions. The students did well, and I had a typical exam curve. Later, at least two students commented in the ratings that I mislead them about the level of detail expected on the exam and the grading was too hard. I was surprised—this is law school after all, and the exam instructions state that highest points are given for the most complete answers. I now tell students that my exam requires detailed answers, and I will be very picky with my grading. The following year I had the exact same exam grade results but no negative comments on the ratings. I had managed student expectations much better.  
4. Be real.  Students respond positively when I share both my career highs and lows with them. They appreciate seeing teachers who have made mistakes but still find themselves happy in their careers. That honest sharing has reflected favorably in reviews.

Here are my tips for eliciting constructive feedback:

1. Don’t rely solely on end-of-semester feedback forms. In my experience, these forms elicit only very general feedback, making them of limited usefulness.
2. Include feedback questions on assignments, quizzes, and exams. I started including questions about specific assignments and learning activities on exams and quizzes a couple years ago, giving students easy points for a thoughtful response. Students have been open with me about what has been helpful or not helpful and why. I have gotten useful feedback from both U.S. and international students this way.
3. Give students the opportunity to assess their progress along the way. I give students several chances throughout the year to share how confident they feel in their research skills, what they want to improve, and what they still have questions about. This can be done anonymously or not.
4. Administer pre-tests and post-tests. I give a similar assignment at the beginning of the school year and again right before summer. This method allows students and me to see their growth objectively. The results are always rewarding.

Un-Google Your Search: Exploring Search Alternatives

I’ve recently read several articles on Google’s current lackluster search results, most recently Cory Doctorow’s take on the issue: Too Big to Care. Doctorow suggests switching to a subscription-based platform called Kagi. As I don’t relish another subscription-based anything, this prompted me to explore what free alternatives exist beyond Google.

Not all internet search engines are created equal:

That search bar beckoning from your internet browser window is either a “search engine” or a “metasearch engine.” The search engine crawls the web and indexes websites for relevance. Google, Bing, Yandex, & Yep are search engines. Metasearch engines pull information from one or more web crawlers and organize the results differently. Many metasearch engines tout their product as a more anonymous way to search the internet.

Alternative Search Engines:

I tested several alternatives to Google, and found not all were truly free – or free from Google, some were owned by entities that made me go hmmm, and some search engines performed noticeably better than others. In an attempt to get a measurable or comparable result, I utilized the same search terms on all platforms during my test. Below, I’ll discuss the options that stood out and merit further exploration.

Brave Search:

• Ownership: San Francisco-based Brave Software.
• Key Features: Utilizes its own web index, offers anonymous searching.
• Interface: Search results can be narrowed to news, images, videos, and something called “Goggles” that lets you customize rankings. There is also an AI search option which provides a list of links to the websites used to generate the answer.
• Performance: Image searches were semi-relevant; news tends to be ranked by popularity and slightly dated.
• Overall Impression: I thought the overall performance was good and the innovative features like Goggles and the AI was fun to play with.

Dogpile:

• Ownership: This blast from the past is owned by California internet advertising company, System1.
• Key Features: Aggregates search results from Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, and others.
• Interface: Allows targeting of search results to ‘web’, images, videos, or news.
• Performance: Image results more relevant than some of the others I tried; I had to make adjustments to filter out Pinterest results. News is ranked with today’s items at the top.
• Overall Impression: Effective for current news and decent image searches, though customization may be necessary.

DuckDuckGo:

• Ownership: Owned by American software company DuckDuckGo.
• Key Features: Does not track search history, filters out low-quality content, includes an AI chat feature.
• Interface: Search can be targeted to ‘all’, images, videos, news, maps, and shopping.
• Performance: Good image results; requires adjustments to avoid Pinterest and YouTube. News results ranked with the most current items at the top.
• Overall Impression: Strong privacy-focused alternative, providing clean and relevant results.

Perplexity.ai

• Ownership: Owned by a privately held American tech startup based in San Francisco.
• Key Features: Combines ChatGPT-like context with traditional search capabilities; offers both free and subscriber-based versions.
• Interface: Resembles a chat interface, search results include images and a summary that contains links to the webpages used to compile the information.
• Performance: News results were relevant but links often redirected to the main page of the news source rather than to the specific story.
• Overall Impression: Offers a novel approach to search with useful context, though link navigation could improve.

Swisscows:

• Ownership: Owned by Swiss software tech company Hulbee AG.
• Key Features: Uses Bing for searches and prioritizes privacy and family-friendly content by omitting explicit results.
• Interface: Search can be targeted to web, images, videos, or music.
• Performance: Image search results were semi-relevant; top web search results often included ads.
• Overall Impression: Privacy-focused and family-friendly, but the relevance of search results and ad intrusion can be a downside.

Yep:

• Ownership: Owned by Singapore software startup Ahrefs.
• Key Features: Uses its own search index, does not track personal information, offers an AI chat option.
• Interface: Allows targeting your search by ‘all’, images, and news.
• Performance: Image results can be irrelevant, I had better luck when I simplified my search terms and utilized quotation marks. News is ranked by relevance, so newest stories may not be at the top.
• Overall Impression: Promising but it’s still in beta mode; worth revisiting as it develops.

From the Ground Up

As a teacher, it’s important to keep trying new things. If you don’t find your lessons fresh and exciting, you’ll have a hard time getting students to engage with them. Usually, this experimentation occurs at the margins, but come this fall, I’ll be ripping up the rulebook and teaching an entirely new version of the 1L Research Methods in Law course that I’ve taught for the past five years.

For the past few semesters, a few of my colleagues have teamed up to teach Research Methods in an innovative, experientially-focused format with a shared curriculum. They designed the format to immerse students into the underrated learning activity of actually doing legal research, using longer (but less frequent) class sessions and shifting all “lecture” content to instructional videos that students watch independently. This allowed my colleagues to devote the entirety of these longer class sessions to realistic legal research “simulations” that students work through with occasional assistance from the instructor.

When I heard about this format, it immediately struck a chord with me. This type of real-time, over-the-shoulder instruction can be incredibly effective, but it can be tough to shoehorn it into my limited class time. Despite the appeal, I had been hesitant to sign up. I’ve put an incredible amount of time and energy into developing a version of the course that is (not to brag) excellent, and the prospect of throwing all of that work in favor of such a different approach is intimidating.

The idea of collaborating with my librarian colleagues really helped to win me over to the experiential format. Whenever I discuss teaching with the other librarians, I get new ideas about how to approach the materials. Plus, we all have blind spots, and these serendipitous conversations have helped me mitigate some of mine. But with all of us teaching our own independently developed curriculums, these discussions are not as common as I would like. Because the team will be moving through the same syllabus in lockstep, we will be able to discuss our experiences after most of the classroom sessions.

The collaboration also extends to the planning process. Switching to this new framework has also given us the chance to rethink the syllabus and materials. This is an especially valuable benefit for Research Methods, since the lower number of credit hours always entails hard choices about what to cover. Accordingly, we have been meeting to plan the syllabus using backwards design, with each of us weighing in on the different skills we want students to have learned at the end of the course. 

This methodology is a particularly good fit for a skills-based course like ours, and I think it’s even more important when experimenting with the course format. I had used backwards design to develop my syllabus when I started teaching RMIL, but I didn’t necessarily apply it with as much rigor when I made tweaks to the materials in the intervening years, resulting in a somewhat less focused course. Revisiting the entire syllabus with my colleagues should result in a set of materials that work well together.

One strength of our approach is that we all bring something different to the table. All of the librarians on the team are at different stages of their career. As a result, some of us are more in tune with how students experience the course, while others are more aware of how the course fits into broader institutional priorities. And although we are all oriented towards teaching practical skills in a hands-on format, our teaching philosophies do sometimes diverge. So far, this diversity has led to productive and illuminating conversations, but it could be an obstacle in some situations. An outcome-focused planning process should mitigate these problems in the long run. If all of the librarians are on the same page about what we are trying to achieve, the means of getting there should be less controversial.