Your Digital Library Tip #2: Finding and Organizing Free Legal Research

Having survived steps 1-5 (see Tips #1, #1A, and #1B), the next objective towards creating the ideal searchable, useable, and useful digital law library involves stocking your digital library with, what else, searchable, useable, and useful publications.

Pretty much any document is searchable with the right software, not to mention "usable" in one way or another (like kindling your BBQ pit).  The focus of this post will be on the useful element.  

Think back to your physical time in a law library.  Chances are you weren't looking primarily for a case.  You were probably looking for a treatise or practice manual on area of law that had previously been foreign to your practice.  Not surprisingly, the treatise you eventually settled on was probably located next to other treatises and some distance away from your jurisdiction's case reporter.  

Your digital library should also adhere to this "separation" principle, at least for the most part, when it comes to treatises-style material and cases.  In other words, your digital library should be comprised with practice manuals and articles that holistically summarize areas of law, save for the one or two seminal Supreme Court and Court of Appeals cases that you have routinely relied on in your practice.   Those cases you've pulled in your case files should, for the most part, stay in your case files.  

So how much money should you spend stocking your digital library with practice manual-style publications?  Here's the good news:  you don't have to spend a dime.  Here are some useful links to free publications (which will forever be posted in the "Resource Hub" column of this web log):

• Free Downloads of Texas Bar CLEs you've attended.  If you've attended any Texas Bar CLE, you have unlimited access to the digital versions of the course material provided at that CLE.  

• Free Monthly Articles for Texas Bar Members.  Each month, the Texas Bar site posts selected articles from past Texas Bar CLEs.  These articles are free for download to Texas Bar members.  

• Free Articles for Everyone.  Litlaw provides a repository of articles covering federal and state law nationwide.

• 10-Minute Mentor.  The Texas Young Lawyer Association provides countless 10-minute how-to videos on various areas of the law.  I found the videos the basics of automobile insurance and employment law very helpful.

Download every article or practice manual you can get your hand on and save each of them in your digital law library folder (yes the one and only one) in the manner described in Tip #1 and according to the category/subject index you've developed for your library.  See Tip #1 for a discussion of the category/subject index and, for illustration, the subject/category index I've created for my digital library (click here).  Don't hesitate to download articles outside your usual practice area.  The goal is to obtain a complete library, not one loaded with information you already know.  

Once you've downloaded and saved the publications, go through your new finds and tag them at will using either TaggedFrog or Taggtool.   Now you've got a comprehensive digital library that will get you quickly up to speed on new, unfamiliar issues.   

Your Digital Library Tip #1B: Taggtool and Tagged Frog are both Winners

I've had a chance to try out Taggtool.  This product is very close to being the real deal for tagging.  At this stage of development, it requires a little too much technical know-how, but like TaggedFrog, Taggtool will likely improve substantially by the end of 2009.   Regardless, Taggtool is definitely a workable tool to tagg your digital law library.

Your Digital Library Tip #1A: Using a Tag Program that Works

Correction to the previous post:  the XP and Vista tagging functions are horrible.  In an effort to correct this madness I went on a quest tonight and tried out two tagging programs.  The first product, TaggedFrog, looks incredibly promising and is very simple to use.  I found it a bit too simple at its present stage for a massive digital law library.  Simple or not, it's free and its functionality is light years ahead of its Windows counterpart.  Even if you elect not to use, I would keep an eye out.  TaggedFrog is at a very early stage of development and it may very well boom in functionality before the end of the year.

The second product might just be the gold mine of the year.  TaggTool compliments Xplorer2 Professional (see my previous post on free software) extremely well.  For $30, TaggTool may end up being the best piece of commercial software I've bought in a long time.  I'll play with it and add a follow-up post on how to best structure the tags.  

Your Digital Library Tip #1: Setting Up the Digital File

I suppose the goal of every practitioner today is to build a digital library of legal resources that you can actually find--sort of like a real library with clearly labeled shelves.

Step one is to take what you have and organize your legal resource documents by subject matter.  My best research finds in college were always the books sitting next to the ones I looked up on the library index.  This "proximity principle" works just as well with legal research.  

Organizing your digital documents can be done the hard way:  creating multiple folders and subfolders and saving your digital documents with useful names like "Article-Medical Monitoring Damages."  It can also be done the less hard way:  

1.  Create one (yes only one) folder on your computer and label it something like "Law Library" or "Legal Resources" or something funky like, "Ultimate Dork Hub."  

2.  Find whatever digital legal resources you have on your computer and copy all of them into that one (and only one) folder.  

3.  Create a list of timeless subject headings.  You can copy the subject index from Dorsaneo's Texas Litigation Guide or the subject index in your preferred state or federal treatise.  The key is keep the subject heading's broad and don't deviate from this subject list.  Click here to review the one I use.

4.  Start renaming all those documents in that folder as follows:  [SUBJECT]-[year of publication]-[Type of Resource]-[Brief Description of Resource].  

For example, "DAMAGES-2009-Article-Medical Monitoring Damages in Texas."  There's no sense putting in the Author's Name or the exact title.  That just ends up taking up space on your screen.  

5.   Here's the kicker--TAG each document with the particular traits of the document.  For example, you may want to insert the following tags in the medical monitoring article above:  state_texas, article, damages, medical_monitoring, personal_injury.  This is a great way to distinguish between articles dealing with state and federal law.

If tagging sound a bit foreign, click here for how-to for Windows XP.  It's supposedly easier on Vista.   There are also some commercial programs out there for accomplishing this task, but the buzz on the net is the basic XP / Vista option will get the job done.  

In the end, you'll end up with one screen full of 100s of documents that will immediately allow you to find the relevant subject matter, know how old the resource is, and know whether it's worth even looking at.  With the tag function, you can limit what you see on the screen by searching (in XP) or selecting (in Vista) the relevant tags.

The Value of Dated Practice Manuals

Special thanks to Evan Schaefer's recent post on a new trial ad book.  It broke my writer's block.    

I'll spare author and publisher names for the sake of mitigating the forthcoming defamation suits . . .   My shelves are stacked with too many expensive, mediocre practice manuals!  

On the one hand, this is somewhat reassuring--if that stuff can get published, maybe the notes I took at the last seminar can too.  On the other hand, spending your hard earned cash on books that amount to cut-and-paste jobs of statutes is frustrating.  

The good news is that used books do have a place in the legal biz.  We all know the law changes rapidly in some areas.  For at least two, however, I've found that you're pretty safe relying on older, cheaper publications.

With notable exceptions (like asbestosis and medical malpractice), civil procedure is pretty much the same today as it was 5 years ago--and chances are, you probably know what's changed in the last 5 years.  That's why I don't waste the effort to pay $100 for O'Connor's Civil Trial.  You can find a perfectly usable 2005 edition at your local Half Price Books or on Amazon.  It's also worth asking some of the more well-to-do lawyers in your locale if you can purchase their old editions at a discount.  I know several lawyers who order a new set every year and simply truck the old versions off to storage never to be looked at again.

Even more timeless than civil procedure, trial advocacy is a subject where you can really mine the archives for useful information.  Two books stand out in my experience:  Thomas Mauet's Fundamentals of Pretrial Techniques and Fundamentals of Trial Techniques.  Their contemporaries go by hipper titles, but the 1980s versions I own are by far, the most useful practice manuals I own.  I purchased them for about $8-12 each on Amazon.