Legal Research

How Do Lawyers Get Their Information?

By Simon Fodden

There’s an interesting little post on Tim Bray’s blog, Ongoing, entitled “The Listening Engine.” Bray, one of the bloggers I’ve been following for years now, is the Canadian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Open Text Corporation and who is now the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. He’s thoughtful, sensible.

In The Listening Engine he puzzles over how it is that RSS and Twitter are resources that some people simply don’t make use of:

When I first discovered the magic of RSS, I expected that it would sweep the entire online population, including everyone?s kids, parents, and grandparents, in a matter of weeks. It hasn?t, any more than Twitter has. My argument: ?If you care about anything online, just subscribe, and then you won?t have to go back over and over to see what?s new.? I thought it was conclusive but it?s not; there are a lot of smart, good people who don?t see the point.

He muses that we may be seeing a simple stratification in society into two layers: those who are well-informed because of their “intensity of listening,” to use his phrase, and those who are not.

It’s my experience that lawyers by and large know nothing about RSS and, rightly or not, regard Twitter as a foolish time-waster: that is, they don’t engage with the web or the internet other than through occasional forays via Google. Of course, there are many thousands of lawyers in this country — some 99,617, according to 2007 stats gathered by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada — so it’s a broad brush I’m painting with here; and hundreds, if not thousands, of these lawyers will use the internet in sophisticated ways. But it’s the broad strokes that limn the future, perhaps. So these are important questions:

How do lawyers get their information? Am I wrong in my assumption that lawyers don’t filter the web for their news and to inform themselves about developments important to their practice? Or does it not matter that the web is ignored?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 10, 2010 (boomark / email).