How Do Lawyers Get Their Information?
There’s an interesting little post on Tim Bray’s blog, Ongoing, entitled “The Listening Engine.” Bray, one of the bloggers I’ve been following for years now, is the Canadian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Open Text Corporation and who is now the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. He’s thoughtful, sensible.
In The Listening Engine he puzzles over how it is that RSS and Twitter are resources that some people simply don’t make use of:
When I first discovered the magic of RSS, I expected that it would sweep the entire online population, including everyone’s kids, parents, and grandparents, in a matter of weeks. It hasn’t, any more than Twitter has. My argument: “If you care about anything online, just subscribe, and then you won’t have to go back over and over to see what’s new.” I thought it was conclusive but it’s not; there are a lot of smart, good people who don’t see the point.
He muses that we may be seeing a simple stratification in society into two layers: those who are well-informed because of their “intensity of listening,” to use his phrase, and those who are not.
It’s my experience that lawyers by and large know nothing about RSS and, rightly or not, regard Twitter as a foolish time-waster: that is, they don’t engage with the web or the internet other than through occasional forays via Google. Of course, there are many thousands of lawyers in this country — some 99,617, according to 2007 stats gathered by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada — so it’s a broad brush I’m painting with here; and hundreds, if not thousands, of these lawyers will use the internet in sophisticated ways. But it’s the broad strokes that limn the future, perhaps. So these are important questions:
How do lawyers get their information? Am I wrong in my assumption that lawyers don’t filter the web for their news and to inform themselves about developments important to their practice? Or does it not matter that the web is ignored?
I’m afraid I paint with the same broad strokes. The front end workload of RSS is too much effort for most, which is extremely unfortunate.
We’ve done custom RSS collections for over half of our clients. Some use them regularly, some don’t. Those that do however, are extremely prolific writers/bloggers and very tuned into their areas of interest. The benefits are there, and most lawyers could be VERY happy with the outcome, but they have to want to listen in the first place. I’ve come to believe that some personalities want ‘current awareness’ in their lives, and some do not.
I would also add, twitter is a very un-systematic method for listening. Great for serendipity, but not great for filtering through quality sources. Buzz worthy sources will always rise to the top, but the listening you’re referring to, IMO, requires going deeper.
Professor: Thanks for raising these important issues. A number of empirical studies of how lawyers acquire information are listed here: http://j.mp/baY4Th . Of particular interest is Judith Lihosit, Research in the Wild: CALR and the Role of Informal Apprenticeship in Attorney Training, 101 LAW LIBR. J. 157 (2009), also available at http://j.mp/aZ1q52 .
Isn’t there a limit to just how up to date anyone can have the time to be? One would be swamped with RSS feeds (or Twitter followings) for large numbers of sites. If one follows only a small number, then it could be more convenient and even more efficient to go visit them when one has the time, rather than having them pushed to one’s consciousness when one is trying to do something else.
No doubt if one makes a point of communicating and wants to show how current one is with all the relevant news, then having the news come to you by RSS makes sense. But even lawyers of the future will have to spend considerable amounts of their time doing the work for the clients, not bathing/drowning in news, however high the quality.
Perhaps the best skill that anyone in the information age can acquire is knowing when to seek information that they don’t have and where to look.
Skimming RSS feeds, even if you limit to just one topic, is a very time consuming task. It would be impossible to deeply read every relevant article and retain the information that is available. Likewise, Twitter is now a deep well of good data. Even if you limit the number of people you follow, which has its own flaws, there is just too much data good to retain.
I believe that success will most often come to a practicing lawyer who can learn the skills of quickly and regularly skimming a few relevant sources, delegate some scanning to a trusted “professional skimmer”, and (the most challenging task) evaluate when to seek information they don’t know exists.
Based on recent experience here, I don’t think that RSS is as broadly understood a concept as we might expect. This is still bleeding-edge for some of our clients, and we had a good turnout this week at a workshop on this very topic!