Legal Research: Trading 95 Books for a Laptop

My senior of high school, I interned at the law offices of Carter & Howard. I remember walking into their law library on my first day. The smell of must and yellowed pages hit me, and a sense of nostalgia for a time past flitted through my mind. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves filled with the Code. These books, some of them as thick as my neck, contained the laws of the state of Tennessee and the federal laws of the United States. The library represented the workable knowledge that is needed to survive as an attorney. I honestly was blown away with how many books there were. It is sad to think that these books are going to become a thing of the past.

Today, the law offices of Carter & Howard are relying on a new way to conduct legal research. Instead of thumbing through volumes upon volumes of law, legal research can be accomplished with the clatter of keys and the click of a mouse (or a trackpad). Digital databases of legal code are being compiled and used to make finding case law incredibly simpler. Legal code publishers such as Westlaw and LexisNexis have digital databases that can be subscribed to by attorneys. Subscriptions can be purchased according the kind of access one would want for their database. You can subscribe for individual state codes, appellate decisions by Circuit, and also Supreme Court decisions.

Imagine 95 law books. They probably have 800-1,000 pages and are over three inches thick. Now, stack them on top of each other and see how high it goes. Pretty high, right? Now, put a MacBook Air next to them. It is like a tree looking at a blade of grass, except this blade of grass contains more cells than the entire tree. Crazy thing to think about. The digital age has made it possible to access untold amounts of information that could fill the libraries of the world to overflowing. The mass amount information that is being gathered in field-specific databases is making knowledge more accessible and easier to expand