Legal Research Technology Concepts

Last week I posted about Legal Research Technology Skills. After reading Sarah Glassmeyer’s post on Slaw about The Future of Legal Practice and Technology for Law Professors. Today’s Tip is about technology concepts that I think are necessary for legal researchers. Concepts are things that a legal researcher should understand and have a rough idea of how they apply to legal research.

1. Document automation (including software and word processing tools like fields and macros)
2. Document management (what is kept within your organization) and content management (how are web sites, intranets and other content rich sources built)
3. Open source publishing and Open Access
4. Social media (Sarah included this as a skill for law professors!)
5. Cloud storage
6. Search engines other than Google and web browsers other than Internet Explorer
7. Project Management
8. Tags and hashtags, taxonomies
9. The costs associated with legal research sources
10. Research sources (fee based and free) that your organization does not subscribe to or have an access account for

The idea of understanding these concepts so that  the legal researcher can pull them out or add them to the toolbox at the appropriate time is implied with this list.

Remember that individuals don’t necessarily need to carry their own toolbox, they can always call a carpenter (or a law librarian :-).