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Poll ar thóin an táilliúra?1
Irish readers will recognise the proverbial tailor, busy sewing great pants for everyone else, whose own trousers are in a sorry state. Law librarians excel at ensuring our clients can access existing precedents and know how instead of fashioning solutions to problems that have already been solved. Initially we will look at some of the devices that can help researchers work more efficiently and then examine some of the ready-made resources for both training legal researchers and helping them to navigate legal information sources.
Faster, Cheaper: tools to ease the quest
Precedents in housestyle
PLC Firmstyle is an add-on to PLC databases that saves users the time and effort of reformatting template documents. Lawtel Precedents incorporate the same functionality as part of their core offering. Once a Firmstyle or Lawtel user locates the precedent they wish to use, it can be opened and edited in the user's corporate housestyle.
LexisCheck - from Lexis Nexis
LexisCheck automates the task of legal proofreading i.e.verifying the accuracy of case and legislative citations. LexisCheck Toolbar analyses documents in Internet Explorer 7 pages and Microsoft Word documents to produce a pop-up report highlighting the status of each case or legislative provision cited. A "traffic light" notation is used to show at a glance the status of each citation, with the option to access additional information about each item.
JustCite Toolbar (formerly J-Link)
The JustCite Toolbar allows JustCite subscribers to see status information, e.g. whether legislation cited has been amended, without leaving the page they are reviewing and also to locate quickly the full text of the legal material cited. For users who are not JustCite subscribers, the toolbar can locate the full text of cited documents, including cases, journal articles, legislation, either on the web or on a subscription database.
Free, but not so easy?
The tools featured above free up lawyers' time to concentrate on more complex research tasks. Tools such as JustCite and LexisWeb (see further p. 124) also save users from looking in multiple locations for a specific item, directing them to free sources of a document where appropriate, thus helping to manage costs as well as time. There are circumstances where the legal web...