I posted my summary (http://tinyurl.com/y9q4fj7) late, so I realize that you did not see it when you posted. I agree that for the first category of search – the "get me the Supreme Court case on preemption," free tools may be all you need (check out the new FastCase iphone app as well). Unfortunately, as a regulatory attorney, I find myself a captive buyer of for-fee legal research because neither Google nor the "second city" providers (FastCase, Casemaker, Versuslaw) cover decisions of federal and state agencies. When I ran regulatory searches on WestLawNext, the relevant cases did come up but I had to sort through an enormous amount of extraneous material to get to them – and I can't figure out an easy way to limit my searches to just a few libraries rather than all versus none.

"The editors of Westlaw and CanLii have not sworn an oath to uphold the laws of Ontario; lawyers have."

In other words, these tools are never perfect. We heavy users come across errors in their content on a daily basis. Regardless of whether it is a free tool, or a fancy commercial tool, it's the lawyer's job to make sure they've done their research thoroughly. Thus, in the end, neither is "good enough". The only "good enough" is meticulous legal research conducted by a human being with an ethical obligation to properly inform the courts, their clients, and each other. We should keep this in mind.

Also, on a lighter note! From a teaching perspective – I loathe system migrations! It mostly stems from the endless amount of explaining that law librarians have to do to help their patrons get up to speed with what the IT people are currently concocting!

If a partner gives a junior a research and then tells the junior that the research time and disbursements will be regarded as non-billable, this may affect the depth and quality of the research carried out.

I think for simple look-ups like 'get a copy of this statute or that Supreme Court case', that lawyers increasingly look to the free or discounted services. Why the lawyer needs to know and how central an issue is to a matter will still steer research in particular directions.

There is likely space for all these services.

In my experience, lawyers do not consult with their Clients concerning which legal research tool they should use, just as surgeons don't ask their patients which scalpels they should use. This is as it should be, of course, as the vast majority of Clients are not qualified to make that judgment call. Moreover, the whole free vs. pay issue is relevant only to Clients whose lawyers are employing cost recovery (which I've previously decried).

If you meant that Google Scholar might be all that some lawyers are prepared to pay for, that raises the thorny issue of whether the free research tools really are "good enough." I suspect that the first malpractice case against a free-tools-using lawyer who missed relevant authority that he or she would have found using one of the pay services may answer that question.

NY Review of Books, v. 57, no. 2, Feb 11, 2010

The Chess Master and the Computer
By Garry Kasparov

In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a "freestyle" chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. …

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

(emphasis added by me)

Law is analogous to chess in at least this much. A specific legal issue necessarily has a finite number of valid solutions. Need I say what the analogue to "weak human" is?