The study presents data from a representative sample of 225 lawyers at more than 90 major law firms. The lawyers give their opinion of a myriad of library services, pinpointing their opinions of databases, information search training, cost effectiveness of their library, info literacy training for new hires, and much more. The report helps its readers to answer questions such as: What do lawyers think of their library and their librarians? Do they support increasing spending on the library? How often do they use the library? How important are paper-based resources to them? Data in the report is broken out by size of law firm, age, gender, professional title and level of self-perceived information searching skill.
Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
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Men in the sample were slightly more likely than women to ask for help from a law librarian; 66.67% of men sampled and 61.9% of women had asked for help from law library personnel in the past year.
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More than twice as high a percentage of associates than partners wanted to hire additional librarians for the law firm library
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29.28% of lawyers sampled considered the overall performance of their firm’s librarians as excellent.
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Legal research accounted for 15.65% of the overall work time of the lawyers in the sample.