Page 8 - Delaware Lawyer -Spring 2021

FEATURE
Lori Strickler Corso
From Detective to Curator
The evolution of the modern legal researcher
Tracking down facts and legal information used to be the hallmark of a good researcher, but in today’s world, technology often plays the role of bloodhound and drops the information at our feet. What’s a legal researcher to do? Are we being replaced by machines? Not quite. While technology does the dirty work of gathering information in a variety of ways, attorneys still need to provide the human touch in organizing, analyzing and selectively applying that data.
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Adecade ago, the emphasis was on helping attorneys find information — be it cases, statutes, secondary sources or other types of materials. We worried about subscribing to the right online legal research platform for our jurisdiction, practice areas or firm size. And once attorneys did gain access to those subscription services, it was a question of how to best use them to lo- cate what we needed. We would have to craft the perfect Boolean terms and connector search phrases (à la “motor vehicle” or “car” or “transport” AND “personal injury” AND “pedestrian”) that would capture all the relevant cases needed, but not return so many results that one had to give up a Saturday just to comb through them. Attorneys edu- cated themselves about the differences
between databases — when should one look at the state court briefs database versus the dockets database? What years were covered by each and which was a better starting point? — and were able to confidently select the one needed. And just when lawyers were feeling proud of their research prowess, tech- nology caught up with us and made many of those hard-won skills feel sud- denly irrelevant.
Today, it is not so much a matter of how to amass information, but how to sift through it and make sense of it. In recent years, online research sys- tems like Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg and others have begun employing ar- tificial intelligence (AI) to streamline the research process, constantly push- ing their users to greater and greater