City Research Online

Abstract

Lawyers, like many user groups, regularly use Google to find information for their work. We present results of a series of interviews with academic and practicing lawyers, where they discuss in what situations they use various electronic resources and why. We find lawyers use Google due to a variety of factors, many of which are related to the need to find information quickly. Lawyers also talk about Google with a certain affection not demonstrated when discussing other resources. Although we can design legal resources to emulate Google or design them based on factors perceived to make Google successful, we suggest this is unlikely to better support legal information-seeking. Instead, we suggest the importance of taking a number of inter-related tradeoffs, related to the factors identified in our study, into account when designing electronic legal resources to help ensure they are useful, usable and used.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Publisher Keywords:	Information-seeking, Google, law, legal, digital libraries, Grounded Theory, user studies
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General) Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z665 Library Science. Information Science Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4050 Electronic information resources
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science > Human Computer Interaction Design

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