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Print or Electronic Resources?
Two Garden Court Chambers is a well-established and still expanding, mixed set situated in Middle Temple. Of the 69 tenants, 25 specialise in criminal law and the others are divided between immigration, housing, employment, family and other civil work. The set has a strong reputation in the fields of human rights and civil liberties, and in 2000 won one of the pilot project contracts to provide second tier legal advice for the Legal Services Commission.
When I joined chambers in 1995 as its first professional librarian, the library consisted of a collection of hard-back volumes spread over seven rooms in two adjacent buildings. One of my first papers for the library committee attempted (with perhaps naïve enthusiasm) to alert chambers to the potential of the all-electronic era. However, four years later, when we commissioned a purpose-designed library in a newly leased annexe, it was to house a hard-copy collection which not only still existed but had grown.
Currently we have a library which looks (for some tenants, reassuringly) like a traditional library, but which houses computer terminals with Internet access and a small range of electronic resources. We subscribe to two on-line services; Smith Bernal's Casetrack and the Electronic Immigration Network and to a handful of CD-Roms, the electronic versions of the White Book, the Green Book and the Civil Procedure Rules as well as Sweet & Maxwell's Housing Law Service, Crime Desktop and Current Sentencing, Context's Weekly Law Reports, and Butterworths All England Reports.
Casetrack, to which we now have the unlimited access subscription, after a tentative start with subject bundles under the "Pay as You Go" tariff, has been the runaway success of our electronic acquisitions. My impression is that the possibility of downloading needed case transcripts from their own computer at any time of night or day (or the sight of colleagues or adversaries doing so) did as much as anything to push hitherto reluctant computer users into getting to grips with new technology. Previously I had access (as librarian) to Lawtel and to Lexis and would search and supply transcripts on request. Otherwise it was a case of tracing the relevant shorthand writers, a phone call, a long wait and, sometimes, a hefty bill (a procedure which will be unknown to newer recruits to the Bar). We switched from Lawtel to Casetrack and have very recently given up our Lexis subscription for lack of use (with some reluctance on my part, on account of its retrospectivity and breadth of coverage).
The complete e-Law Reports are on our list for a future acquisition but tenants were unimpressed by the earlier CD version and the law reports we do take on CD-ROM seem to get regular use by only one or two members of chambers. This may be because the most regular users have taken out personal subscriptions and access them from home, or because tenants still regard the CD as the stop-gap for occasions when a hard-copy volume cannot be found.
The subject specific CDs have been the cause of some disappointment. Few tenants have felt they delivered what they promised, the updating often being behind the hard-copy loose-leaf versions. Further sources of irritation have been the variable and varying pricing structures and mistakes in printing (CD's having to be immediately re-issued, for instance). However, the hot links from loose-leaf text to cases in the CD versions of encyclopaedias have kept practitioners hooked if not always happy.
A number of factors got in the way of our original vision of a desk-top library of networked CD-ROMs for every barrister; the vicissitudes of clerking software which had to take priority with our IT person; financial caution in the light of the unpredictable outcomes of legal practice reforms; financial priorities created by the need for increased accommodation. In the meantime the pattern of working has changed, with a significant number of tenants doing most of their paper-work from home and equipping themselves with their own resources. And legal publishing has moved away from the CD-ROM to the Internet.
Issues arose early about which electronic resources should be considered chambers' resources (paid out of the library budget) and which should be charged to individuals. At the moment the cost of electronic case law is covered by the library budget, but practitioners are asked to pay their share of the cost of subject specific services. This formula has only been arrived at after a lot of discussion by our library committee and it differs from our policy on hard-copy since the library does buy text books in the various different areas of practice. The (perceived) greater expense of electronic resources has always hung heavily over these discussions.
Like the "paper-less office" the "book-less library" remains as far away as ever. We have not been able to discontinue a single hard-copy subscription on the basis of an electronic substitute. With law reports, advocates still seem to feel that the page layout of the paper version is required for handing up in court (or how else can I explain the reams of photocopying still carried out?). A recent attempt to reduce our loose-leaf subscription list (to meet temporary financial constraints) met with 100% resistance. Familiarity with the hard-copy version of an encyclopaedia or practice manual is apparently too precious to jettison and publishers offer lower prices for "existing hard-copy subscribers".
Nevertheless, it would be unthinkable now to be without those electronic resources we already have, or not to be watching out for new developments.
Sonia Michaels is the Librarian at 2 Garden Court.
email soniam@2gardenct.law.co.uk.
The series continues next time with two provincial firms.
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