Many of you know me from certification and from LEU applications that you have
submitted and I have hopefully approved. You might not know that I also am a
lawyer. I went to IU Bloomington School of Law and I've worked for all three
branches of government as well as a couple of nonprofit legal organizations.
Like many other areas of research most legal research is done online now
and so that's what we're going to focus on today. Here is a little roadmap of
how I'm planning for things to go. This may all go out the window,
but this is what I'm aiming for which includes leaving time for questions and
answers at the end. I want to start by telling you that I put together a three
page resource guide that will be available for you to download at the end
of this presentation. It links to each of the resources that I mention
in the presentation and to several additional useful resources that I may
not mention in the presentation. I want you to be sure to download that
because in the long run it may be the most valuable thing you get out of
attending today. Like other areas of research most legal research is done
online now so that's what I focus on in both the guide and the presentation. The
only resource in the guide that doesn't have a link is: I've made a reference to
Black's Law Dictionary and I'm not aware of any free version that's available
online. I still thought that was worth mentioning because it is pretty
much the gold standard in legal dictionaries.
We're going to start with a little review of the four
main sources of law: the Constitution, statutes, case law, administrative
regulations. We'll talk about the last three in the next couple of slides.
Of course the US Constitution is
preeminent and no other law should conflict with that. Also to point out
that the Constitution's main function is to put limits on government and so most
of what a constitution is going to talk about are things that the government can
and can't do. The state constitution can grant greater
rights than the federal constitution but it cannot grant fewer rights or less
rights than the federal constitution. The judicial branch: Legislatures pass
laws and the courts interpret them. Case law refers to the body of law that
appears in the court's written opinions. Generally what you need to know is
that trial courts usually don't issue opinions although they might issue
orders, which you might be able to find an order from a trial court. Appellate
courts issue opinions and in Indiana the Indiana Court of Appeals issues opinions
that are sometimes considered unpublished opinions. You might
actually be able to find unpublished opinions, which is a little ironic, but
even though you can find them you should know that you should not rely on them.
They are not to be cited or or otherwise considered binding. State and federal
court cases are published in a series of different reporters. The citations to
those reporters are usually abbreviated. State cases can be cited in two
different ways using a regional reporter or a state reporter and probably the one
abbreviation that you maybe most need to know is
Northeastern because Indiana is in the Northeastern region. Any Indiana cases
you find may have a Northeastern site attached to them. At the end of the
resource guide I have a link to a reference that lists out the
abbreviations for the different regional reporters and the Supreme Court
Reporters too. If somebody comes in that wants to find a specific
case they just want to read the Citizens United opinion,
finding that is a pretty straightforward thing. I'll demo that in a minute but
something to keep in mind is that different orders and opinions may have
been issued each step of the way. If they don't have an actual citation to a
case but just the name like that you might find it or you might find a lot
more than just what you're looking for. For example Brown v. Board of
Education lasted for years. There were multiple cases. There's more things
you'll find than just one case coming up it says this is Brown v. Board of
Education (the one you're looking for). I just mention that so that you
have a sense of what might come up when you start looking for these things
and we will actually look for something in a moment. Back to the two separate
systems your federal and your state systems. The legislative branch: Indiana
Code is where you'll find laws that are passed by the Indiana General Assembly
and the U.S. Code is where you'll find the laws that are passed by Congress. In
addition, state agencies and federal agencies, executive branch agencies, have
their own set of administrative laws. Rules and regulations that are passed by
state and federal agencies do have the force of law.
The actions involving administrative law may not start in the court they would
usually start at the agency with an administrative hearing that would either
be before an appointed board were an appointed administrative law
judge. But if the situation is not resolved at the agency level then they
would get kicked into court also and there may be eventually court opinions
that address how state or federal rules and regulations are interpreted too. All
of the legal authority out there is generally divided into two categories:
Primary Authority and Secondary Authority. Primary Authority is the law.
Those primary sources are the law itself and they include
statutes and case opinions. Secondary sources explain the law and
they include legal dictionaries, legal encyclopedias, legal periodicals,
annotations, and treatises. Pretty much everything that's not a primary source
is a secondary source. Primary sources are considered binding. If you're in the
jurisdiction it came from you have to follow it. Non-binding Authority: all
Secondary Authority is just there to be persuasive. It doesn't dictate
what a court or a judge has to do or how they have to find in an
opinion. It's just something that you can use to persuade or to understand, for
background information to understand. Just an example of when you might
use each type of source primary and secondary: You would want to look at a
primary source if a patron asks you a factual question like: is it against the
law to drive a tractor on the street? Or what happened in that case? Or do I
need to have a license to go hunting fishing or drive a boat? Those are things
where the answer is going to be in the statute or the rule. If it's "what
happened in that case?" the answer would be in the
appellate opinion. You would look at secondary sources when the patron asks
more of a process related question, such as "When did environmental laws start
coming on the books?" or "What events surrounded
the creation of the EPA Superfund sites?" Those are the kinds of things where
someone wants to get the big picture as opposed to more of a yes-or-no question.
That's when it makes sense to turn to a law journal or a treatise
on the topic. To give a specific example of what you would find in a
primary source versus a secondary source - looking at expungement - the first thing
is the code sight. What did the Indiana legislature pass on expungement? What
does our current law say? You would look at the Indiana Code to find the answer
to that. The second cite is to an Indiana case with the North Eastern
Regional reporter that I mentioned earlier it cited there.
You would look at case law to find out what have any Indiana courts said about
expungement or how have the courts interpreted that law. In this particular
case the Court of Appeals held that a trial court has to have a hearing before
denying a contested petition. The statute says that the prosecutor
has to agree to an expungement. A contested opinion would be if the
prosecutor doesn't agree. This court thought since the prosecutor has to
agree, I don't have to grant this if the prosecutor doesn't agree.
But the court said no, you do have to have a hearing at least.
Those primary sources are specific to Indiana in this
case. The secondary source is a an article on recent developments at the
state and federal level. It compares Indiana's law to a handful of other
states that have been active in this area and it talks about the reasons why
expungement statutes are increasingly necessary. That's going to give you
more of a theoretical background and a and a historical background and
reasons why the law is changing in this area.
Taking that the case cite and the law journal cite that were in that previous
slide, I just give you a little idea of what these citations mean. The parts
of the citation: The first one, the case citation, starts with the parties to the
case. The next thing is a volume number. That's the volume of the reporter, which
is the middle part, the abbreviation N.E. 3d. That's the third series
in that reporter. The next numbers, the first one is the page
cite that the case starts on, and a lot of times that's all you'll see in a
citation to refer to the case as a whole. If the citation is actually giving a
quotation or is referring to a certain principle that was decided in that case
there might be a second number in the citation and that would be where
that specific quotation appears in the case. Next is the court that the case was
decided in and the year that it was decided. On the on the Law Review article
it's not that different from other types of citations. You've got the author and
then the title. Then the first thing that comes is the volume of the the Law
Review that it appeared in. The Law Review name is always quite abbreviated.
If you need to find what that actually refers to -- in this case it's
Harvard Law and Policy Review -- a lot of times are very obvious. LJ is
Law Journal. You can find lists online of what those abbreviations are
if you just look up "law journal citation abbreviations" or something like
that. Most lawyers go through school using a blue book that lists out all
those abbreviations. And then the page and the the year. To look at a Supreme
Court case, they are cited a little bit differently due to the
fact that there are three different reporters that report Supreme Court
cases. They have what we call parallel citations. Each of those three
citations are to the exact same case, same date, same court, same
version of the case. The differences each of those reporters are formatted a
little bit differently. In this case the first thing you get are the
parties to the case. The next thing is the volume, the reporter and the
page, but you get that three times. The difference
between those three are that the first one is going to be the official
government version of the Supreme Court opinion as it was handed down. It's not
embellished or dissected or made useful in any way beyond the text of the
actual Supreme Court case. The next one is the West publication. West has a
series of keynotes they use to identify different issues in
different cases. There's a whole bunch of different keynotes.
For lawyers doing research they can find a key note that is useful, it's the
topic that they want, and then they can research based on that key note and get
a lot more information about other cases that may use that same key note.
The final version is Lawyers Edition which is just an annotated version that
gives lots of other information that is relevant to someone researching that
case. I just thought I would touch on that before we go on to federal
resources. I'll just say up front I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time
on federal resources because this is a very challenging area and frankly my
best recommendation is that you not try to search the U.S. Code directly, but
rather consider what the topic is and try and figure out what agency regulates
that topic and go to that federal agency website for the area of law that you're
looking at. Most most agencies will also provide a link to the
specific statute or act that they deal with. So you can get to the
actual statutes that way, but it's a little more
focused then trying to search the whole U.S. Code, which is many, many volumes long.
To that end, the first thing I listed on the resource sheet is usa.gov, which
links to websites of departments and agencies and branches of government.
That's a way to get into finding that and just is a little example this is
from the resource sheet. Within the
Department of Justice the there's a whole section of the website on the
Americans with Disabilities Act and some examples. There are documents that tell you
specifically how to file an ADA complaint as well as a whole list of
publications and resources that have been put together by the federal
government that include materials for state and local governments and for
businesses and nonprofits. I've done this with a variety of other
agencies based on thinking in terms of what types of issues might your patrons
be asking about. Where would you go to find information on those issues. Because
this is more like regular research that you might do as a
librarian I'm not actually going to demonstrate this. But on the resource
guide I've given additional links to a variety of areas that may come in handy.
Now we're going to try and pull up Brown v. Board of
Education. If you're specifically looking for a federal case I'm going to give you
a couple of different ways that you can find it through free services online. The
first is using FindLaw. This is the screen that comes
up when you first pull up FindLaw gives you a little window you can type in the
case name and then hit search and this is what it brings up. It brings up a list
of cases. In this case you can see that
it's bringing up five cases. You can we see two of them here so in the next
slide I scroll down a little bit to show you -- here the five cases. Four of them are
actually Brown v. Board of Education and this is really what I was referring
to when I said 'some cases will be harder than others to find what you're looking
for.' If you already have a citation it makes it a little easier because then
you can look at these citations and figure out which one you want. If you
don't have a citation you might have to open several of them to see that some of
them are really basically just short orders and you know that that's not the
whole Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. In this case
we want 347 U.S. 483, which was decided in 1954.
That's the second entry and when I click on the second entry this is what I
get. Through FindLaw you get the full case access without any login
and for free. I'm going to take a moment here to talk about -- if you pull up an
older case like this -- this is more than 50 years old -- the question
might come up as to whether or not it's still good law. I would be inclined
to say that that's a question that should be referred to a lawyer or a law
librarian and here's why. There may have been this case originally, but then the
next case might have said a person can do X, and the next case might have said a
person can do X but only in these circumstances, or only in this
jurisdiction but not in that jurisdiction. Then a third case might
say a person can no longer do X. Then Congress or the legislature might turn
around and say we don't like that outcome so we're going to adopt a law
that does the opposite. So answering the question of is this good law is
really complicated. Those are some of the things you need to be wary
of and reasons to always qualify your answer with "But I'm not a lawyer."
We will talk about that type of communication a little bit later. Also on
FindLaw you can get to this opinion summary archive where you can search by
topic. If you don't have a specific case in
mind, but you want to see what's out there on a large number of
topics you can browse by topic on FindLaw, also for free.
The second resource I want to mention for pulling up particularly federal
cases is the public library of law. These same websites also will
let you search for state cases too, but I think it's easier to go on the court's
website to look for a state case sometimes. If you have trouble finding it
on the court's website it might make sense to do a search here. To
give you an example of how these function a little bit differently, I put
the exact same thing into this site, the Public Library of Law. I put in Brown
v. Board of Education and then when I press search it brought up -- instead of
five results --it brought up 841 results. Now is that a good thing or a bad thing?
If you're really looking for Brown v. Board of Education that might be kind of a
hassle. Also, by the way, it's a much slower process. You have to give it
time to search for these because it's pulling up so much more. These cases are
related cases, these are all the cases that cite to Brown v. Board of
Education, not just cases that are part of that case. When might that be
useful? If you're looking for a recent case that cites Brown v.
Board of Education, like what's happening not 50 years ago but now in the area of
desegregation and are these cases still coming up. Or if you are trying to do
research in that area as opposed to wanting to read that specific
case. But let's say you still want to read that specific case. You can actually
see the case citations. Actually on this whole first page
Brown v. Board of Education, the opinion your looking for doesn't even come up.
But you can lift the citation from here because you can see that most of these
cases are all citing the same opinion, which is the one that one I mentioned
before. In the next screen I put in that just that that reference to 347 U.S.
453. I'm having a little trouble seeing the tiny numbers. To narrow down the
results -- I did the search again this time entering that citation and this time it
just brought up the case
we want. There are two listings of it but they're both
the same case with the same date on it. That gets you to a more on target
result. If you click on that here's what you can get access to in the
Public Library of Law it brings up a tiny little synopsis. In some cases
you get a little more synopsis than this.
Some cases give
you a little bit better synopsis, but the point here is that in order to get
access to the full case on this website you would need to set up an
account and log in. It's a free account, so you don't have to pay for it, but you do
have to log in to get to the full access of the case. That's what we
have there. We're going to take a look now at the Indiana General Assembly's
website looking for Indiana specific statutes and legislative materials. If
you go to the Indiana General Assembly's website, under the laws button,
there's a ribbon across the top that gives you different choices. One of them
is Laws. Choose the menu item Constitution and you can see here the
ribbon that says Laws and underneath it the
choices of Constitution, Indiana Code, Non-code Statutes. If you choose
Constitution it brings the Constitution right up. It's not a terribly long
Constitution and you might want to read it sometime. It is sort of interesting
and because it's quite different from the Federal Constitution. Some
areas may seem pretty familiar because it also overlaps a bit with the
Federal Constitution. Looking up Indiana Code, which is the most useful thing you
can do on this Indiana government website. Before we start looking at it,
just a few minutes about how the Indiana Code is organized. An Indiana Code
cite is usually four numbers long. It may be shorter than that, you may see a
shorter cite if they're not referring to a specific section but to a whole
chapter. The order of those numbers is always the same: the first number is
always the title, second number is always the article, third number is always the
chapter, and if there's a fourth number listed that would be the section of that
chapter. It's helpful to know that the Indiana Code is organized into 36 titles
and these are large main subject areas. For example Education is one of those
36 titles, Criminal Law is one of them, Civil Law is
one of them, Property is one of them,
Elections is one of them. If you're not sure what area you're in you can
actually start by finding the title and then narrow in what you're looking for
from there. It's a bit like using an index. You can see the titles
listed on the left hand side and then if I click on the Probate title it brings
up the articles that are in the Probate Code. Along the left these are
all selection points you can make. By the way the
General Assembly recently revamped this access to laws on their website. On the
resource guide I listed a link to a little explanation of how to use this
site - that may be helpful if you find it difficult or if you've used it in the
past and found it easy and now find suddenly find it more difficult because
of the changes that they made. It sort of addresses the changes. You're
narrowing down what you're looking through first by selecting the
appropriate Title and then once you bring up the Articles in the Probate
code clicking on Article 3 now you can see the Chapter titles listed under
Article 3. We're trying to get to a specific section on what needs
to go into a petition for guardianship. The reason I'm doing this as an
example is because I had a request of people wanting to know if there's a
guardianship form. There's not a guardianship form, but here we're going
to get to the Chapter on Proceedings for the Appointment of a Guardian.
Clicking on that Chapter brings up the section numbers. By the
sections you can see - did I go too far? - we've brought up the first Section here
which is actually what needs to be in that petition. I'm not suggesting that
you necessarily need to do this for your patrons by any means. Just to show
you how you can use this left-hand side like you're looking up
in a book the Chapters which pages you want you just keep moving through it to
get to the more specific example. There's another way to get to the same place and
that is if you happen to know what the exact code site you want is. In this
screen I put in up on the upper right hand
corner is a space where you can put in the numbers for the code cite you want. I
put in the numbers that we just found going to other way through this.
When you click the little magnifying glass for search it brings you right to
that section. That's always going to be the easiest way to bring up a code
cite. But you won't always have the exact citation. In fact unless somebody
has been reading something that makes reference to a citation and says how
would I find this -- that's when you would use this method. Because it's pretty
limited it's helpful to know these other methods. I'm going to show you
what happens if you do a word search in here in just a second.
One of the questions that somebody mentioned to me was is "it against the
law?" People want to know "can I do this?" That's a tough one to answer because
you can't really rule out all the possibilities. You can maybe
find something on point, but you don't know what you don't know, unfortunately.
How can you go about researching that a little bit? You can start by
checking the Criminal Code which is IC 35. That won't tell you though if
there are civil penalties. Civil penalties also may mean it's against the
law, it's just not a criminal law. Also you might want to be
aware of the fact that plenty of criminal laws fall outside of IC 35.
In fact, the last article of IC 35 is a whole list of
cross references to criminal laws that fall outside of IC 35. If we
wanted to look in IC 35 for example to see what is the offense for
possession of marijuana, just as an example. We would look in 35 until we
found Controlled Substances. Under Controlled Substances you
can see Offenses Relating to Controlled Substances. Within
that Possession of Marijuana comes up so you can move to that section and see
here's the Possession of Marijuana statute. That's pretty easy to find
looking in Title 35. But then let's say you want to know about Public
Intoxication? Well that's not in Title 35. Why not? Because Alcohol and
Tobacco is the title that it's in, Title 7.1. But if you use
Title 7.1 like in index and look for the article that has Crimes and
Infractions and you look in that Article you get to a Chapter on
Public Intoxication. So you can find these things by moving through
the Title -- to the Article -- to the Chapter and the Section. Interestingly
enough though, you find Public Intoxication in Alcohol and Tobacco, but
you don't find drunk driving there. Drunk driving is in Title 9,
the Motor Vehicles title. If you look through the articles in that
title you'll find that there's one named General Penalty Provisions, so that's a
pretty good tip that that's a good place to start looking for Motor Vehicles.
In fact Chapter 5 of that Article is Operating a Vehicle While Intoxicated.
I mention this for two reasons. One is that not all criminal law is in the
criminal code. The other is that finding law is similar to other aspects
of librarianship in that if you don't find it the first place you look it can
be very helpful to think in terms of what else it might be under. You might
think in terms of driving while intoxicated, well it involves a
vehicle. You might think in terms of the relationships between people. If the
issue is a Landlord and Tenant one that relationship is over property so you
might look in the Property code. it's just an example of finding things that
aren't directly in the first spot you might think to look.
Another option you could have going
to the General Assembly's website is in the upper right hand corner -- and
you don't see it on this screen because I did the screen shot after I entered it --
but in the upper right hand corner in the same place where the where you could
enter code cite, there is an option right next to that to enter a word
search. This is an example of a word search. The
thing I searched for here was "operating while intoxicated." I put that in the
keyword box and hit the little spyglass to do the search. You'll see
that what comes up is in a variety of chapters and there are other
types of operating while intoxicated than you might have thought of because
operating a motorboat while intoxicated is also a criminal law. That's just an
example of using that word search box. Other things you can find at the Indiana
General Assembly website and there are links to each of these functions that
are underlined on the resource guide. You can find bills by
bill number, by subject, by legislator. You can find who your legislator is by
putting in your address. If you know you want
to look for the library bill that was passed this year - if
you have that bill number you could stick in the bill number and it would
pull it up or you could look through the subject index and find that
it's under libraries. Library is one of the things in
the subject index. If you look under library this is pretty much the only
bill you'll find. Click on it and you'll find it. I've also given a link in
the resource guide to Digest of Enactments. That's a digest of every
bill that passed during the session. Just to let you know that some of the
links in this paragraph -- it looks pretty much like what you see
on the screen -- some of those links end up being specific to 2018, so they'll work
for you now. But if you tried them again next year you and you really want to be
looking for the 2019 session just pay attention to that. Other links, like find
your legislator are going to work next year and beyond
because it's going to take you to a different kind of a page on their
website. Okay, that was a big chunk of information. I have one more section I'm
going to go over but before I do are there any questions so far? This is an
opportunity for you to let me know what you want me to talk about a little
bit here. I'll give you another opportunity
after the next section, but I wanted to give you two opportunities to check in.
While you're typing I will just mention that I did have one person write
to me ahead of time and ask about Shepardizing. I'm just going say a few
words about that here. Shepardizing is a process of reviewing case citations to
determine if a case is still valid. This goes back to the conversation we had
earlier about whether or not a case is still good law. It used to
involve going to a whole series of books to look up your citation
over and over and over again. Now most people do that on a subscription service
online, like Westlaw. What they find online when they put in their cite is a
series of flags red green and yellow. The green would tell you that the case has
been upheld. Yellow would tell you it's been questioned. Red would tell you
it's been overturned. If you're in a really complicated area of law you might
find all three of those and sometimes you might find more than one of them
even in one case if the case upheld it in part and overturned it in part.
This is not something that I think probably you need to figure out but just
so you know what the reference is to. If it is something you want
to try and do on your own just for the heck of it to see what it's like, I have
included a link to an article on the resource sheet
that talks specifically about shepardizing cases.
How do you find out how your representative or senator voted?
Since it's an election year people want to know that information. If you
pull up a bill you can see in the history
of the bill what the vote tallies were on that bill. But you're talking more in
general. There are different organizations that compile voting
records based on the specific issues that they're interested in. Otherwise
I don't have a lot of thoughts on that. It's not a one-stop
process I would say. Resources for legal forms other than Indiana.gov? Where?
Most of the resources that I am suggesting are Indiana.gov and here's
why. There are a lot of different websites that will provide legal forms,
either for free or for some kind of cost.
In our experience, forms provided by government sites are going to be more reliable. The agency that handles that area of law is going that handles that area of law is going
of law is going to be the best one to tell you what should go into those forms.
[Sylvia: And didn't you provide some links to some forms?] [Yes, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the guide here for a second
because I know that probably most of you actually know already that there are
divorce forms available on the Indiana Supreme Court website. Those
forms are divided into a couple of categories: with children,
without children, contested, uncontested. That's pretty easy to find and to
make available to people when they come in. What you may not know is that also
on the Indiana Court site -- I listed two different places to go to. One
is the public portal and one is the self service part of the site.
Between the two they offer a lot of different forms and information, including child support
guidelines, a child support calculator. I've listed a
hotline number for child support. I listed the link to divorce just
because it's relevant, even though most of you probably already know that
one. There are expungement forms on the Indiana Supreme Court website. They're
not necessarily that easy to find, but I put a link to them. If you go
to their frequently asked questions on the self-serve site it says that they
don't provide expungement forms but in fact the form is there on the site.
They don't provide guardianship forms and they give a reason why and I've
clicked a link to that reason so that at least you can answer the question that
there's a reason the Supreme Court doesn't make that available. There's not
a one-size-fits-all form for that. Actually the expungement form is not one
size fits all, it comes in several different sections. They have to go
through each section of the form and decide and then put those sections
together. It is more complicated than most of the other forms, I think.
Parenting time guidelines, mortgage foreclosure help, applying for a marriage
license, and a parenting time calendar. There's a way to plug in information
that can generate a proposed calendar for you based on the parenting time
guidelines. There's also an Indiana Parenting Time Helpline. These are all
listed under Indiana Courts in the in the guide that I prepared as well.
I've put links to Small Claims Court information and I know one
person mentioned that they had trouble finding small claims court forms.
I've linked to Small Claims Court forms for Marion County. For all other
counties there is actually a guide online for for taking a case to Small
Claims Court. I've also listed connections to Indiana Legal Services
for Eviction and Immigration information. Some of those may contain some forms
also. One other thing, I had a question about power of attorney
forms. There are so many different types of power attorney forms.
There's not one sample form. There is a sample form that came up a lot when I
was looking at this, but it was not a reliable site, so I didn't want to use it.
There is one type of power of attorney form that I did find a reliable
resource for and that was for a health care representative --
power of attorney for health care decisions. I've listed two reliable
sites for that that give you sample forms. One is an
Indiana site and the other is AARP, which has -- you can pick Indiana so that you
get Indiana specific forms. I'm gonna keep going. I'm going to ask
for questions again in a moment. The next thing we're going to talk about is
really important and I probably had saved the most important thing for last.
This is really the message that I hope you come away from this with:
How to avoid practicing law. We're going to talk for a moment about
why to avoid practicing law. The Indiana Code of Professional Responsibility says
that the reason unauthorized practice of law is not allowed is to protect the
public from getting legal services from unqualified persons. So there's the issue
of protecting the public if you don't really know what you're talking about or
referring them to.
Perhaps of more interest to you is because it's a Class B misdemeanor to do
so. I know you aren't going to do the things in number one or two. You're not
going to say you're a practicing attorney and you're not going to go to trial on
behalf of someone in a court in Indiana. I'm not real worried about you doing
that. The third one is the one that you need to be probably most concerned about
here: engaging in the business of a practicing lawyer.
It's important that you don't imply that you're authorized are competent to
furnish legal advice or perform legal services. To avoid unauthorized practice
of law it may be helpful to know what the practice of law is considered to be.
It can be summarized as "activity requiring legal
skills or special knowledge beyond that of the average non-lawyer." I guess if
I have a message for you it's that questions like "is this still good law?" --
that's probably something that requires special skills. "Can you shepardize
this case for me?" might also be something that requires specialized skills.
Just in case you were wondering what are the consequences for a Class B
misdemeanor, there's a maximum penalty of a hundred and eighty days in jail, a fine
of up to $1,000, you could spend up to a year on probation. That's a pretty
good reason to pay attention to the next two slides where I've shared some
phrases to avoid and then the one after that is going to be phrases that are
your friend. Phrases to avoid and my thought here
is to just mention to you that, as with doctors, there's a lot of specialization
in the law. Your hand doctor doesn't necessarily look at feet. You probably
don't want an orthodontist delivering your baby.
Even lawyers who are trained in how to practice law, if they specialize
in one area, they usually will avoid offering opinions about other areas. Why?
Because when I stray out of my field the biggest danger is that I might
not know what I don't know. It's not what you know that's
the problem. It's not what you know you don't know that's the problem, because
you're going to be careful to say "I don't know this." It's the things you don't even
know you don't know that are the problem. I'm going to say that one more time: when
you stray out of your field the biggest danger is that you don't know what you
don't know. That is true for me as an attorney as well as for you as a
librarian. Phrases that can be helpful and that I encourage you to use when you
are helping patrons with legal research: I am NOT an attorney. Some of you
may actually be attorneys. I know there are a number of librarians who are
attorneys, so I'm just gonna mention this. Even as an attorney I personally would
not offer legal advice at a library unless my employer was paying my
malpractice insurance for that specific activity. Even if you are an attorney
there are reasons not to go there in a different setting than in a qualified
law practice. In addition to the other phrases I've listed here -- the idea
of "I can show you the resources but I can't interpret them for you." "I can help
you find the books." "I can help you print off forms." "I don't have the proper
training to answer that question." I've listed here also at the end "I don't know
the answer but I can point you toward how to find someone who does." I would
suggest and encourage you to keep the phone number, if you don't already do
this, of your local bar association handy as many local bar associations have some
kind of a referral service. I also think it's important to know that the
referral service that a person gets from the local bar is not going to be for
free or even low cost services. Because of that I've also included in the
resource guide a link to contact the pro bono districts there are -- I'm not sure how
many -- 7 or 13 pro bono districts around the state.
Each one of them has a coordinator with contact information that can be a
resource for finding free or low-cost legal services. I would also invite you
to consider that there may be an opportunity here for you to partner with
your local bar association or with your local pro bono district to provide
information and resources. Invite the groups of people who can give legal
advice to come to the library and do so. One other piece of information
about trying to set up something like that,
the State Bar once a year does a training for attorneys to
participate in an ask an attorney program. There are other
bars that do this kind of training too. Once they've been in that training,
it's designed to prepare them to do a one-day project on Martin Luther
King Day. But there's no reason they couldn't also create opportunities for
events at your local library. The pro bono districts actually like to
work through libraries. That's another possibility in terms of finding a way to
make services available rather than relying on your own research skills. I
also want to point out that even Sylvia and I use disclaimers. Things like "please
note that the purpose of this email is to provide general information and not
legal advice" and I've tried to do that both because it's a good thing to do and
to set an example. I put this information at the
top of the resource guide that we're going to download in a second. For
legal advice you have to contact an attorney. That's kind of just all there
is to it I'm afraid. Now is the next time I have available for some questions.
While you're typing I will mention that I was asked about a one-page lease.
Somebody had a patron that came in and said "can you print off a
one-page lease for me?" I could not find anything of the sort.
A lot of times the answer is just going to be "no I can't help you."
In the slide after next we are going to show you where to download the resource
guide. It's not a slide. In the screen after the next one
we're going to show you how to download the resource guide.
I see typing so I'm going to pause
before I move to the last screen, and see if there's another question that comes
up. I'll go ahead to the next screen and still see if there's another question
that comes up. I'll just say that if you like me and you think of your question
right after you leave the room or right after you get off the call or the next
day, not to worry here is my contact
information. Let's see if we have other questions. I have a question:
is it okay to direct individuals to the Nolo type books for form creation? I
think it's fine to say we have this book or here's this book. I think in general
the Nolo products are reasonably good. I just think you want to avoid
saying "here's how you do it" or "you should rely on this." [Sylvia: They may want to have their attorney view the final result if they use a Nolo type book.]
[Another point that is worth making and this is mentioned somewhere on
the Supreme Court self-help site I think. There are possibilities now of
working out an arrangement with an attorney where you pay them less to do
less of the work. You're not asking them to take the whole case, if you
do the forms yourself and they just maybe read them over before submitting
them, so that you can cut down on the cost of legal expenses by
dividing up the work. Having the attorney do just the things the attorney
needs to do and the client can do a little bit more of the legwork or the
research or pulling together things that they need.
So yes, they could certainly use that just to save time and to save money
and if it's a complicated issue it's still gonna be a good idea to have an
attorney look it over. I know a lot of people can't afford that and
unfortunately our legal system is not entirely just in that way.
Databases, should we help them find a specific form?
For those of us with access to a legal forms
database, should we be helping them find the specific lease form? Or should we
just point them to the computers and have them look and choose themselves? [Sylvia: I'd
say they could show them the different forms of leases that patrons should have
to choose which one. The librarian shouldn't choose which one they are going to use.] [ Right, so you can get them to the general area they need and then
have them figure out which one of those things they need. [Sylvia: And they still should have their attorney review the final result.]
I would also say you pay the vendor for access to those databases,
I think it would be good to ask that question of the vendor and see what they
say about what's the appropriate way to assist patrons in using this
resource. I think a lot depends I haven't actually
used the database that you're referring to I don't know how careful they are
about having disclaimers on the database but it never hurts for you to make a
disclaimer. So, if there are ten types of rental agreements, I would
say you can show them here is the rental agreement section of this database
and let them select which of those rental agreements applies to their
situation. That would make sense okay oh and that's actually what
Sylvia just typed. We're just about at time now I'm going to go
ahead. I've got my contact information here for you but what I'm going to do
now is pull up this screen. Oh, I forgot to do this:
The formal content for the webinar is over now so we're going to stop
recording.
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