Reading Time: 5 minutes
My immersion in law school life continues. All faculty are asked to proctor a final exam so I had that experience. The room slowly filled with laptops and piles of books and notes and outlines, sometimes supplemented with scratch paper. The laptops are a requirement for the exam. But I was still struck by the place print materials hold.
Not everyone had them but most people had some book or book-adjacent stack of organized pages. When I was interviewing at another law school before taking this role, I sat in on a class. The class experience was very much like the exam experience: everyone had a laptop and most people also had a stack of paper.
It makes sense if you think about how the information is being used. In an exam, you have the added addition of being locked out of other applications. But even without that, there is a certain amount of constraint in trying to use a single screen for multiple purposes.
Times change. I remarked to a “senior” faculty member about how, when I was at SMU in the late 1990s, we were an early adopter of exam software. But it was at a time when laptops were still not universal and the buildings weren’t designed for computers. We gave a laptop exam in a seminar room one morning and noticed that the wall clocks, wired into the mains, had started to slow down. The electrical draw from the laptops was too much for the wiring.
We have largely solved this in our work spaces by adding a second or third monitor. We work off one, with the additional screens absorbing the need to be able to refer to—whether to read and analyze or cut and paste data—the related relevant data. Or as someone commented to me recently, sometimes you need to have all of the information spread out in front of you.
Multiple monitors only get you so far. In some cases, like exams, you do not have them. I’d love to see the use of multiple monitors in law school classrooms. I envision a laptop video connection at their desk and a screen or two in front of them, so that an outline and a casebook could be displayed at the same time, side by side. This would have the practical effect of getting them ready for how law firms (should be) are going to provision technology for them too.
That, of course, assumes that the digital analogs are used in the same way that a print version is. Does the student prefer to highlight in print? Are they sharing a book and annotations with another student? Or did they buy a used text that they’ve gotten comfortable with? When we discuss format choice, so much of it goes beyond what is “better” and lands more appropriately on what’s available.
When I was in law school, real property was taught by Robert Wright. And, over the years, an outline had been created by students that was mass produced and passed on to the next year. Since his lectures rarely varied from year to year, “Bob’s Bible” was a must-have study aid. Each student annotated their own and it was updated in some manner, but I expect there are similar sorts of Google Docs floating around these days.
I am solidly in the camp that handwriting and not laptops are better for note-taking device, especially in a context like law school. Law students are required to memorize, if not for the degree then for the bar exam, and they seem a perfect audience for handwriting.
I was on a panel at MAALL’s annual meeting and we were specifically talking about the place of print in the law school. I tend to have a “when it’s needed” feeling about print. We are 20 years past the day someone told me we’d only have print reporters for another 5 years. And, having worked in public law libraries, you realize that the print format is sometimes the only accessible format for people who are unused to legal publisher databases.
There is probably a technology path to blaze here, moving lawyers and law students off of laptops for note taking and onto tablets. Tablets that have palm rejection technology so the experience is like traditional handwriting. Tablet note apps that convert the handwriting into text. Perhaps even note apps that convert that text into AI-powered summaries. Imagine walking out of a deposition with a summary based on your own notes and having had the mental benefit of taking notes.
But print formats are a technology too. Clearly, law students and self-represented researchers are still self-selecting print. I would suspect that a lot of lawyers do as well. If they license any commercial legal publisher’s database, they may still get that one annual or one hornbook-like volume that they have been flipping open since they started practice. Given the number of lawyers who start their legal research on public or free legal sites and do not license a commercial product, these books may be a key method of research.
I have taken to sitting in our library on mornings when I have my own reading to do. For the most part, I use ebooks or PDFs of law journal articles and read them on my tablet. I like the portability if not the variability of the reading experience, sometimes swiping to the side, sometimes upwards, with different apps acting in different ways.
One thing about a print text, they all work the same way. I wonder about the professional ebook market and its future. There was widespread discussion of an ebook plateau in the mid 2010s and even now, while there is projected growth, it is not large. One site projects Canadian ebooks to grow by .31% and that the audience will remain below 18%, with the US increasing by .5% and clearing 21% but I don’t believe that the professional ebook market is that large. Will we eventually see a format loop, like we did with vinyl records, with music listeners returning to a wider variety of formats (due to availability, perhaps, but also in response to ownership questions).
One thing that surprised me was the students who would stop by the low stacks near where I sit, getting one of the study aids: Glannon’s, Nutshells, that sort of thing. There are small signs on top of the stacks for our Lexis Digital Library where some of those titles can be accessed virtually (and are, as we know from usage statistics). But still the print books move. And I’m fascinated by the reasons behind that. A student, given both options, still leans on the print format. Why?
So much of public law library research is intermediated that I think it can be easier for librarians in those libraries to observe (and to reinforce) why print formats make sense for certain types of information. There is a greater disconnect with law students (and, I suspect, lawyers) because they may be accessing this information without a librarian’s involvement. Lawyers may keep the book in their office, out of sight, out of mind. I’m already thinking about how we might survey students on their format choices.
The lack of knowledge makes it hard to know what role print can play. I think there is plenty of observable activity to suggest there is a role, and that role will vary depending on the information organization. But I don’t feel confident I know why the choices are being made, nor what collection choices we should be making to adapt.
For example, we get Proview ebooks from Thomson Reuters, available both within the Westlaw platform and without, on the Proview platform itself. Why? Should we be pushing towards the discrete ebook format or are our students and faculty most likely to just use the database access point? It’s this sort of question that muddies the ebook data water, I think, because the publishers may be sharing the information in digital formats that compete for attention within their own platforms.
Or can we use the local content function in the Lexis Digital library to drive some of our students to that content? One idea we’ve knocked about is to take our 1L exam reserve collection–exams donated by faculty for future students to study–and drop it in the Lexis Digital library. Then create a combined collection of 1L study aids (from legal publishers) and matching exams (from faculty).
In the meantime, though, it seems that there is no reason that print formats will stop being a preferred format by some people engaged in legal research. I wonder if we will see some blurring of lines between the annual legal texts, the study aids, and self-represented-oriented texts like those from NOLO. Those might have been audience specific choices before, with law schools only buying one or maybe 2 of those verticals. But if print diminishes because it fails to drive revenue for publishers, will we be trying to fill that print need from other verticals?
I once thought that libraries might embrace a technology like Espresso #RIP. Print-on-demand is widespread if we’re discussing coffee cups and t-shirts but not so much for books. One never knows, I suppose. Sometimes these sorts of ideas–like the ability to use information in a format you choose–is cyclical.
At the same time, if we are making an assumption that print, whatever the preference, is a diminishing format in professional publications, there seems to be some work needed to chart that path. Returning to where I started, how does a law school provide an open book exam on a laptop that cannot support a variety of windows and applications? How does a law student interact with multiple digital information sources without multiple screens? I remain confident in print enduring but I think there are some interesting challenges to recreate the experience of using the format, which are not solved by merely making a digital version of the format.