The phrase “access to justice” is commonly used to refer to programs and services that are designed to help individuals who are not represented by attorneys. This includes programs and services offered by law libraries, including My First Law Library.
In practice, I have come to believe that law libraries also provide access to justice by assisting attorneys as well.
However, this concept is a hard sell to the judiciary that oversees My First Law Library. Some judges see law librarians who assist attorneys as “doing their homework for them.”
In my community, many attorneys are solo practitioners, or work for law firms that may have at most five to seven attorneys. Compare that to law firms thirty miles up the road in Washington, D.C., many of which have a couple hundred attorneys on staff. Most of those firms also have their own staffed law libraries, which their attorneys are encouraged to use.
The attorneys I work with usually do not have access to legal databases like Westlaw or Lexis, or even to a bare-bones treatise collection. Many of them would readily admit that they are good lawyers — or even great ones — but more than a few would also confess that they are lousy researchers.
This is where I come in.
How does assisting attorneys qualify as providing access to justice? Easy. Attorneys charge by the hour, and every hour that a librarian spends doing intensive research is an hour that a client does not have to pay for — a very important consideration for any client who isn’t rich.
But from an attorney’s perspective, that kind of savings is not always seen as a good thing.
Recently, one of our county’s larger firms purchased access to the Westlaw legal database system. I mentioned to one of the attorneys at the firm that if they ever found that they needed to get access to materials that were “out of plan,” there was a good chance that I would be able to get access to them for free.
“No worries,” the attorney told me. “We can bill it to the client!”
But clients hate to see a bill that includes research. They assume — correctly, I believe — that they are hiring a well-trained professional. What many clients don’t understand is how dynamic the law can be and how much research is almost always required.
Why is that? Changes handed down by appellate courts often establish new legal boundaries, and can even change the law itself. In my state, for example, the whole concept of third-party child custody recently underwent a huge revision. I suspect that the opioid crisis is to blame for that; too many kids have parents who have become addicted, requiring other family members or friends to care for their kids.
But I am getting way off track here. In the posts that follow, I will discuss work I have done for local attorneys that demonstrates the value of providing attorneys with access to justice.
My First Law Library 