To watch trends is to see developments as things move from one point to another. Every so often, the trend arrives at its destination. That’s sort of how I felt when I read about the Grayson County (TX) law library. Some local press is better than others in covering their courthouse law library, and so it has been easy to watch Grayson County’s story unfold.

Courthouse law libraries in Texas, like in many U.S. states, are a statutory creation. They don’t have to exist – in Texas, they may be created – but if they do, their operations are described by statute. Who is responsible (courts, county commissioners), how they are funded ($35 per filing fee, traffic fines), and so on.

Grayson County was overseen by the district attorney until recently. They had a hard time filling the law library role last year. They have been moving it around, after not being able to merge it with another library, to smaller spaces. Now that the county commissioners are back in charge, they’ve completed the county law library’s transition. Locals will find:

  • the library space is now a lawyer/client meeting room
  • the law librarian’s title is now “Probate-Mental Health-Law Library-Records Management Administrator”
  • the library will no longer have a physical presence, since it will be accessible 24/7 on the internet
  • the services it provided to local prisoners has been eliminated, since Grayson County has licensed tablets from a 3d party vendor for prisoners to use for legal research access.

None of which are surprising. It is completely reasonable that a municipal funding body would make these alterations to legal information access. From their perspective, they have managed the resources for which they have oversight. It does, however, raise questions about what legal information is and what it means to have access to it.

I do wonder if Grayson County has only a finger-hold on the lip of a cliff, though. One reason these future states are tricky is that they still need to comply with the statutory definition to retain funding. It’d be fair to ask if Grayson County really has a law library any longer.

Let’s look at these a bit more generically.

Space

This is perhaps the easiest one. The administration of justice has, until the pandemic, required an enormous amount of space. More courtrooms = more judges. More judges = more cases processed. Jurisdictions in Canada also need robing rooms, since the lawyers wear special clothes in court. All of which requires space.

Contrast that with courthouse law libraries. For lots of reasons, foot traffic may be so low as to render the library space empty of people. As print texts can be licensed in digital formats, the need for collection space diminishes. From a funder’s perspective, the need for the empty-able space – no people, disposable content – to be converted to court space seems obvious.

I’m often struck at how, despite the huge number of self-represented litigants there are, courthouse space seems only to be directed to the bench and bar. Buildings that require a card swipe. Spaces that aren’t publicly accessible. Lawyer/client meeting rooms are nice but I hope it’s just terminology. Lots of self-represented people could benefit from having a space to prepare for a trial or hearing.

Another thing I wonder, though. Before eliminating a law library’s space, partially or completely, does anyone:

  • measure how much the space is actually used? Or is it just always empty when the decision-maker stops by, and so anecdote becomes truth?
  • analyze whether opening differently, based on the measurement data, would in fact increase footfall?

Unfortunately, the funders may not take the time. And without someone in the library to advocate for it, no-one else may be sufficiently invested.

People

Someone in the library. It’s the people that make the difference. You don’t need books to have a law library. You could historically get away with a room full of books – or a link to an electronic database – without a person only because lawyers are taught to do legal research. As soon as you have a lawyer who isn’t trained or current on their research skills, or anyone else who isn’t trained, you need a subject matter expert. A law librarian. The added benefit of a law librarian is they are often able to do far more than fill just the knowledge gaps of others.

There are many types of expertise. You may not have a law librarian. A “Probate-Mental Health-Law Library-Records Management Administrator” will have specific expertise. The role fulfills the local government’s need to keep their headcount low while still delivering key services. There is no reason to think that someone in that role isn’t an excellent law librarian. Or an excellent records manager. Probably not both.

Grayson County received nearly $93,000 in 2019 and $70,000 in 2020 for the law library fund. Like most law libraries, it was nearly all (about 96%) from filing fees. The budgeted salary for their law library staff is $41,332 for 2020.

Unfortunately, I think one of the things Grayson County experienced is that it is hard to get law library expertise. Whether the job isn’t well paid, or isn’t full time, or is in an environment where the law library’s very existence is precarious, I don’t know. Why is any job hard to fill? Grayson County felt that the salary was part of the problem:

The amount of money the county wanted to pay for the position, [District Attorney Brett Smith] said, was not enough to draw qualified candidates.

https://www.heralddemocrat.com/news/20190817/grayson-county-law-library-has-new-keeper

One challenge in law library hiring is that a position can tend to require a lot of expensive education. Library degrees and law degrees are expensive and the process of getting them creates a funnel that limits candidates. They raise the salary expectations of the holders. The people hiring for those library jobs may not see the value in the degrees, particularly when they are trying to fill a role that is perceived to largely involve helping people fill out forms. There is a subject matter expertise disconnect there.

I expect that courthouse law library salary budgets will always be under pressure. There are other things to spend that money on, and little incentive to raise the salary to a more competitive range. It means people in those roles may not have leverage to seek more, regardless of their value.

Everything is on the Internet

I’ve posted recently on how we can’t even get ebooks for all of our texts. That’s avoiding the issue of how courthouse law libraries can deliver ebooks to an indeterminate audience. The idea that a courthouse law library can license adequate content access 24/7 is laughable.

Many courthouses have opted to just keep a terminal (which itself speaks to the outdated mindset of the decision-maker) for internet access. This works because legal publishers license per seat, and so a single PC means a one-to-one license. It also means you exert a physical restriction – the need to be at that PC – on people wanting to do legal research.

A better approach is obviously remote access. Researchers – who may not be lawyers – having the ability to do their research by going directly to a legal publishers site or being authenticated by the library before getting there. But that’s a lot more costly, both in publisher licensing dollars and in infrastructure, than just having a PC in a room.

While funders may say that the content is 24/7 accessible, my guess is that they don’t know. Or that they are focused on the content, like court forms, that they provide themselves. Again, I’m not meaning to suggest they are wrong.

A challenge for the law library is to recognize how its services are being used. We may offer gourmet food, but if all we sell each day is a bottle of root beer from the cooler by the door, we need to recognize what our customers want.

I think it is likely that we overstate the need for legal information access in the form that law libraries traditionally have provided it. The difficulty is that we have a space-oriented approach. A municipal funder can either provide a physical law library or not provide one. They don’t have a middle option. If, for example, a state created a network of legal information access that enabled the municipal body an ability to contribute dollars without space, that could be a positive solution. Unfortunately, I think our current environment encourages each library to shut down if it can’t be fully utilized.

Disintermediated Services

This is perhaps the most pernicious. There is a trend in jails and prisons to eliminate physical law libraries. They do it for the same reasons as public law libraries, and for additional security reasons. Unfortunately, the solution is to license secure kiosk-like tablets from third party vendors.

Tablet’s are an example of burden shifting. Access is not always reliable and collections are limited. [For more reading, a 2019 report on law libraries in Illinois prisons] Even our law libraries can’t provide a law library entirely virtually. Everything’s not available digitally, and that’s only dealing with the content, unless the tablet allows interactions with a law librarian. But tablets are being used to eliminate the cost of duty counsel, lawyers who can advise prisoners.

It is cheaper for the funder to license the content from the 3d party tablet provider, or directly from the legal publisher, than it is to maintain the law library. Unless the funder sees the value of hiring someone, who has experience in licensing legal information and maintaining a collection and answering questions, they won’t see the problem with just buying a license.

Without a legal researcher involved, the buyer doesn’t really know what they’re getting. Hopefully, when this happens, the district attorney or some other end user will be involved. A financial person without an understanding of licensing electronic content – and the inability to price compare – may end up licensing something that goes un- or under-utilized.

The thing about Grayson County is that I don’t fault them for any of their choices. These are all outcomes that could occur in any municipality that has a courthouse law library. I think the disappointing element is that there are better ways we could be providing legal information so that funders like Grayson County have more options than just turning the legal research tap on or off.