The current edition of the Law Library Journal [1] from the American Association of Law Libraries [2] has a nice article that documents a recent study testing the search behaviours of law students – see:
Lee F. Peoples, “The Death of the Digest and the Pitfalls of Electronic Research: What Is the Modern Legal Researcher to Do? [3]” (2005) 97(4) Law Lib. J. 661 [available in full-text, PDF, 19 pages].
The study supports the suspicion that many law students go directly to full-text searching and overlook the use and advantages of digests (such as the West key numbering system, equivalent to the Canadian Abridgment in Canada).