Chapter 9

Education and Resources

Outside academe, people thrust into the position of law librarian often have no background in the field of law. That was true of me when I started: I had an MLS, but no JD. Sometimes, however, law librarians start out as paralegals, file clerks, secretaries, or other professionals in the legal field but are rerouted into librarianship without the training (or, perhaps, the desire) to be librarians. I encountered that situation at Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, and again a year later, when I took over a corporate law department library that had been under the reluctant stewardship of an accounting technician.

The value of a JD for law librarians is an ongoing debate, as is the value of another degree: the MBA. Most law firm and public law librarians lack both of these degrees. How are they successful? By taking advantage of the books, training opportunities, and professional support available to law librarians.

Should You Get a JD?

In the law librarian ejournal LLRX.com, George Butterfield wrote the definitive answer to this question.1 Another excellent piece is Stephen Young’s essay “The Dual Degree: A Requirement in Search of a Justification.”2 Following are my thoughts, which begin with a story.

When I worked at Charlotte School of Law, an instructor who taught first-year legal research and writing—we called it lawyering process, or LP—wanted me to help her create a new LP assignment. Claudia (not her real name) planned to give all the students the same set of facts and split them into plaintiffs and defendants. Each student would write an appellate brief for his or her side and, at semester’s end, argue the case before a panel of “judges” consisting of LP faculty. The students would also be given the cases, statutes, and other authorities needed to write their briefs. The LP program had been using the same assignment for the previous 3 years, but now each instructor had been given the freedom to develop his or her own assignment. Claudia needed me to find authorities to support the new assignment she would be writing.

The old assignment had involved a teenage girl suing her high school because she was not allowed to join the wrestling team. This was a classic Title IX3 case. Claudia wanted to keep the case school-centered but change it from a federal matter to a state one. She was interested in cases where a student was suspended for the length of his hair and sued the school on constitutional grounds. We discussed various indignities—a student suspended over his hair length, or having a tattoo, or using a cell phone—that have resulted in actual litigation. But those cases were all First Amendment claims (i.e., challenges to personal liberty). As a rule, first-year students have not studied constitutional law, so those scenarios wouldn’t work.

Then Claudia had an idea. What if a student did something not to get suspended, but to lose a college scholarship? Not getting the scholarship might mean not going to college, which would mean not becoming a doctor, lawyer, or other high-wage earner. In other words, what if the high school unfairly deprived a student of the chance to start a career? The legal term for this is interference, which can be negligent (accidental) or tortious4 (intentional). Each type can be further classified as interference with a contract or with a business relationship.

The four types of interference are not interchangeable, meaning that if you sue for tortious interference but the court finds that negligent interference occurred, you lose your suit. Why? You made the wrong accusation. Claudia decided the facts would suggest that the school had committed tortious interference with a business relationship by denying a student a scholarship. My job was to find actual North Carolina cases of this type.

You may assume, from my excellent overview of interference, that I understood the fine distinctions among the four types. I did not. The overview was cribbed from North Carolina Torts, second edition, by David and Wayne Logan. You may also assume that, using a keyword search on Westlaw (see Chapter 5), I had no trouble finding appropriate cases. Well, I did find cases containing the terms tortious interference and business relationship, but we could not use some of them. Why? There were different reasons. Maybe the case involved other elements besides interference and was decided on those elements. Or maybe it was not sufficiently analogous to the assignment. Claudia had to make those evaluations; my job was just to find the cases. This was a useful job for me to do. It saved Claudia time and prepared me for what would be my real job: being a resource for those students as they worked on their briefs. With a JD, though, I would have possessed the skill to find and evaluate the cases, freeing up Claudia to do something else. She would have bragged about the library staff to the entire faculty, a critical piece of library marketing (see Chapter 8).

A JD is an asset to a law firm librarian in the same way: It confers cachet and some expertise to make research projects a little smoother. For public law librarians, however, a JD is of little benefit—and can actually be a hindrance. Public patrons already ask for more help than librarians can legally (and practically) offer. If they knew a librarian had a law degree, they would be even likelier to ask for help drafting documents, interpreting statutes, and deciding case strategy. A public law librarian with a JD might be inclined to answer these questions, thus putting the library at risk. Law firms have malpractice insurance to pay the claim when legal advice goes awry, but public law libraries carry no such insurance. Though I argue in Chapter 3 that legal reference rarely equals legal advice, a prudent law librarian always behaves as though that misunderstanding could occur. Having a JD makes that occurrence a little more likely.

There is one other way a JD will help a law librarian: advancement. In 2006, according to an article on Liscareer.com, “nearly six out of ten (55.6 percent) law librarians had earned an MLS without a JD. Another 24 percent had both degrees.”5 This statement combines academic with law firm and public law librarians. In academe, the percentage with both degrees is higher. In law firms and public libraries, it is lower, even among managers. Why? Library boards and law firm administrators seem to recognize that legal skill is just one element of being a good law librarian. The total package of skills will earn a librarian a promotion, JD or not. By the same token, if only one candidate out of several has a JD, I have no doubt that, all other qualifications being equal, the JD candidate will win the job.

In academic law libraries, the JD is mandatory for moving up, at least at an American Bar Association–approved law school. ABA Standard 603(c) states, “A director of a law library should have a law degree and a degree in library or information science and shall have a sound knowledge of and experience in library administration.”6 Although the standard says “should” and not “must,” and you could argue that management, unlike reference work, requires little expertise in the law,7 the chances of being a law school library director, or even a department head, without a JD are slim. Two reasons for this: 1) All the deans and faculty have JDs and will want the library managers to have them as well, and 2) library managers almost always have tenure-track faculty appointments, for which a JD is essential.

Some universities have combined JD and MLS programs,8 allowing you to earn both degrees at once. I recommend this if you are thinking of library school and you know you want to be a law librarian. For those already in the field who want the JD, there are two options: Quit your job to go to law school full-time (unlikely) or keep working and get the degree part-time. Understand, however, that many law schools do not have part-time programs. Why? These schools view part-time degrees, and those who earn them, as inferior—and a lot of attorneys feel this way as well. Moreover, a part-time degree takes 4 or 5 years to complete. That is half a decade of squeezing one of the world’s most demanding graduate programs into your spare time.

How About an MBA?

In Chapter 3, I said that some law firm librarians do as much business research as legal research. They get questions such as: What is the gross national product? What were Microsoft’s profits last year? Who is the CEO of Baker & Taylor (a private company, which is hard to research)? Can I get a copy of the most recent 10-K for General Motors? The prevalence of these types of questions seems to suggest that holding an MBA as a second degree would boost a law librarian’s career. Is this true?

An MBA would be an asset in some instances. The largest law firms (i.e., those with 100 or more attorneys) are divided into practice groups that are, broadly speaking, one of two types: litigation or transactional. Recall from Chapter 7 that litigation attorneys are what we most often think of when we think of lawyers. They go to trials, write briefs, file and answer complaints, conduct depositions, and handle appeals. If their case is a business case—say, a company’s shareholders suing the board of directors over misstated earnings—then they would need the type of business research mentioned previously. If, however, the case is a Clean Water Act suit, or an Americans with Disabilities Act claim, or a criminal defense, then MBA skills will likely not be needed.

Transactional attorneys would be the real consumers of these skills. Such lawyers negotiate contracts, buy or sell companies, apply for patents, set up limited liability companies (LLCs) or limited liability partnerships (LLPs), design an employer’s compensation or employee benefits plan, or write the will that gives Blaydon Graycastle’s entire estate to a bewitching blonde. An MBA-trained librarian, upon being asked for a company’s 10-Q,9 or that day’s LIBOR,10 or an example of a REIT11—all requests I have gotten and met with a sotto voce whimper—would no doubt know immediately what to do.

Yet I found all these things without an MBA. (So do most business librarians. According to various surveys, only about 20 percent hold this degree.12) How? I did a little research on the terminology before looking for the appropriate document. Or I simply asked the requesting attorney what it was. Business lawyers know their field is not widely understood, even by other lawyers, so they don’t mind explaining a few concepts en route to getting the documents they need from a librarian.

Books on Law Librarianship

There aren’t many other books on law librarianship beyond the classic I mentioned in the introduction, Deborah Panella and Ellis Mount’s Basics of Law Librarianship (1991). By “classic,” I mean “dreadfully old.” So much has changed since this title (like, say, the internet) that, as an introductory text, it is only slightly useful.

Some more recent general works include:

Law Librarianship in the Twenty-First Century (2006, Scarecrow Press), edited by Roy Balleste, Sonia Luma-Lamas, and Lisa Smith-Butler

This book aims to be comprehensive, with chapters on public services, collection development and acquisitions, government documents, administration, technology, law library history, and more. Once you get past the preponderance of prolegomena—foreword by University of South Florida library science professor Vicki Gregory; preface and acknowledgements by the editors; and an introduction by Roy Mersky, law librarianship’s éminencegrise—you see that, except for Chapter 2, “Working at the Law Library: A Practical Guide,” and a page in Chapter 8 on case management software, the book mostly applies to academic libraries. For example, Chapter 3, “Administration,” offers advice on working with a law school dean but not a law firm managing partner. No one outside a university would know or care about microforms, print indexes, faculty status, CALI, or ABA accreditation. And despite the growing globalization of legal practice, less than a baker’s dozen of American law firm librarians would get any benefit from this book’s discussion of foreign, comparative, and international law librarianship.

For those, however, who see in law librarianship not just a job but a human drama, this book, like most academic writing, provides needed context. In the foreword, Gregory observes that law librarianship “has been treated as a stepchild” for years by library science professors. Now, though, “electronic storage of documents, Boolean searching methods, and the steady evolution away from reliance on print resources … have served to make law librarianship today a branch of 21st-century librarianship rather than a branch of the study and practice of law.” Kinda makes you feel proud, doesn’t it?

Public Services in Law Libraries: Evolution and Innovation in the 21st Century, edited by Barbara Bintliff and Lee F. Peoples (2007, Haworth Information Press)

Let’s see … two chapters on faculty services, one on student services, one on teaching students, and one on, of all things, services to law school administrative staff. Yet this book is not as law school–heavy as others. Law firms get a full chapter, as do state and county law libraries. Plus, there are chapters on privacy, marketing, and other topics that, while ostensibly about all libraries, apply more readily to those outside academe.

Something unique in this book is the chapter on online catalogs. OPAC discussions often appear in the wider library literature, but they are rare in the law library field. The chapter’s theme is innovation. “Online retailers such as Amazon.com have raised the bar for the delivery of information,” observe the authors, who also bring up Netflix, iTunes, LibraryThing, Facebook, and other snazzy sites that make an OPAC look pretty unfashionable. Legal research is a closed universe, and practitioners are familiar with most of the tools, so the catalog tends to be overlooked in law library usage. Big mistake, argue the authors of this chapter, who recommend ways not just to use the catalog more, but to use it better.

Law Library Collection Development in the Digital Age, edited by Michael G. Chiorazzi and Gordon Russell (2002, Haworth Information Press)

This is the first book-length treatment of collection development in law libraries. It was heralded when it came out as a first-rate work of scholarship that also addressed the everyday concerns of the working librarian. Very few of these concerns have changed in the 10 years since the book was published.

Westlaw and LexisNexis, the Ford and Chevy of legal databases, were just moving from CD-ROM to the internet in 2001, when this book was being written, so you can pretty much ignore its descriptions of the inner-workings of those databases. Also, unless you work in an academic law library, pay little attention to chapters such as Michael Chiorazzi’s “Books, Bytes, Bricks and Bodies: Thinking about Collection Use in Academic Law Libraries.” As I explained in Chapter 1, academic law libraries have a patron base (professors) and collection priorities (interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and obscure) not shared by law firms or public libraries.

Other chapters, however, are timeless, such as John Detham’s chapter on the consolidation of legal publishing companies. The decade since 2002 has seen more mergers, of course, but Detham’s background is essential for any law librarian. Ditto Scott Matheson’s chapter on access versus ownership. Again, today’s electronic products are way ahead of last decade’s, but there are still only two options for acquiring them: lease or buy. Matheson details the considerations for each. Finally, Julie Turner’s chapter on electronic court records tackles a subject that rarely appears in the law library literature. Yet searching court records is a huge part of what law firm and public law librarians do every day.

The Changing Role of Law Firm Librarianship (2008, Aspatore Books)

One of a few recent titles devoted to this topic (another is How to Manage a Law Firm Library, also by Aspatore Books), this book is a collection of essays by library managers of monolithic, sometimes multinational, law firms. The overall theme, as the title implies, is change—in other words, how the duties and purpose of the law librarian are changing as these huge firms are created by the mergers and mercy-killings of smaller ones. As new librarians don’t know what the law firms are changing from, they will need to use their imaginations, especially with passages such as “In the mid-eighties … case law research meant the West digests or the ALR annotation system. Case verification meant using a stack of Shepards Citations.” Shepards—is that a pie? Bit players at the Nativity? (See Chapter 5 for a discussion of Shepard’s, complete with apostrophe.)

Clearly, this book was not written for novice librarians. With a little experience, however, you will find that most of it opens like a spring tulip. You don’t need the argot of law librarians to understand the main challenges facing today’s law firm libraries, which are:

  1. Rising cost of publications
  2. Transition to electronic resources
  3. Marketing the library
  4. Staying relevant
  5. Becoming beloved

I discuss other challenges in Chapter 10. To see these same challenges discussed by multiple authors reinforces to new librarians the importance of mastering the relevant skills. To see them discussed from multiple angles gives new librarians a head start in that mastering process.

None of the authors just noted, however, discusses what I think is the hardest skill to learn: understanding the attorney mindset. I touch on this in Chapters 3 and 8, but there is much, much more.

Books on Legal Research

Law librarianship, as I said earlier in this chapter, is about a lot more than legal research. Yet the librarian who fails to develop sharp research skills will soon be out of a job. The books on librarianship just mentioned discuss legal research in general—too general to be of much use. To get the needed expertise, you should read at least two of the following books dedicated to legal research: first one written for the layperson, then one written for a legal professional.

For laypersons:

For professionals:

The layperson’s books are self-help types of books. Why start with one of those? Because they are easier to understand. Self-help books don’t cover everything law librarians need to know, however, which is why you need the professional book as well. Table 9.1 lists a few more distinctions between the two types.

Table 9.1 Distinctions Between Self-Help and Professional Legal Titles

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Research Guides

Print

As you read in Chapter 2, each state has its own statutes, cases, and regulations that determine lawful or unlawful behavior in that state. There are also state-specific secondary sources, used all the time by attorneys in that state. For example, North Carolina has:

These are major titles used by most North Carolina attorneys. However, out-of-state attorneys and public patrons might not be familiar with them. Plus there are obscure titles, such as North Carolina Real Property Mechanics’ Liens, Future Advances, and Equity Lines, unknown even to most in-state practitioners.

As a law librarian, you might want to recommend any of these titles to a researcher, but how would you even know about them? Answer: North Carolina Legal Research (2010) by Scott Childs. It is one of several published bibliographies of North Carolina law. Comparable bibliographies, or research guides, exist for every state, often published by W.S. Hein (www.wshein.com), and you can find most of them at any academic law library. Just search the library catalog for research guide and the state you’re interested in.

There are also guides for other countries and even for specific areas of law. These are useful not just for identifying monographs and treatises—a good catalog search will find those—but for journal articles, major statutes and cases, administrative rulings (hard to identify otherwise), or just the structure of another country’s legal system. Some examples are:

Online

In addition to print research guides, most academic law libraries have electronic guides posted on their websites. These tend to be less in-depth than print guides, covering only the major resources familiar to practitioners. Some go beyond the basics, however, listing, for example, specific Westlaw and LexisNexis databases on certain subjects. Plus, online guides are updated more frequently than the hard copies. Three of the best are those from the Georgetown Law Library, the University of Washington Gallagher Law Library, and the Cornell University Law Library.

The Georgetown Law Library Research Guides listing (www.ll.georgetown.edu/research) comprises over 100 topical guides (Figure 9.1), including non-U.S. law guides—United Nations, European Union, treaties, international agreements—not found at most law libraries.

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Figure 9.1 Georgetown Law Library Research Guides

The guide also includes self-paced online tutorials ideal for seeing the research process (as opposed to reading about it in one of the previously mentioned books).

The Legal Research Guides from the Gallagher Law Library at the University of Washington (lib.law.washington.edu/ref/guides.html) consist of hundreds of guides indexed by topic rather than listed alphabetically like Georgetown’s guides (Figure 9.2).

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Figure 9.2 Gallagher Law Library’s Legal Research Guides

Many are on new areas of concern—blogs/RSS feeds, genetics, end-of-life issues—and there are several on careers, an old concern dressed in new hardships. Washington’s MLS program has the best law librarian track in the country, which is reflected in the guides catering to librarian concerns—Bluebook 101, Legal Dictionaries, Going Beyond Casebooks. The best guide on the site? Judicial Humor. Go there and read it now.

The Legal Research Engine from Cornell University Law Library (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/WhatWeDo/ResearchGuides/CLL-Legal-Research-Engine.cfm) is a simple-interface search engine for research guides, legal blogs, and other law-related websites (Figure 9.3).

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Figure 9.3 Cornell University Law Library’s Legal Research Engine

Blawgs

Blawgs are law-related blogs. These can be great sources for news, trends, opinions, and professional development. Several good ones specific to law librarians13 are discussed here.

LLRX.com (www.llrx.com) is a monthly ejournal whose editor, Sabrina Pacifici, has a corresponding blog, beSpacific (www.bespacific.com). LLRX, which stands for Law Librarian Resource Exchange, is simply the best law librarian site out there. Why? It includes thousands of original articles, dating back to the 1990s, on exactly what law librarians need to know (Figure 9.4).

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Figure 9.4 Features and Columns section of LLRX.com

Some examples are:

The Law Librarian Blog (www.lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog) is a traditional blog (Figure 9.5), with news (“Baltimore Law Budget Increase Raises Some Questions”), job postings, commentary, case summaries, blog links, tense humor, and five-minutes-I’ll-never-get-back weirdness (see “Friday Fun: Lego Law for Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad,” October 21, 2011).

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Figure 9.5 Postings on the Law Librarian Blog

Some pieces, though, are invaluable professionally, such as “Some Thoughts on Thomson’s Acquisition of West Being Honored as Worst Legal Publishing Merger” (October 24, 2011).

OK, I list this one for a selfish reason: The Charlotte Law Library News (www.charlottelawlibrary.wordpress.com) was co-founded by me when I worked at Charlotte School of Law. Back then, we posted once a month and averaged three hits a day (two of them were me, inflating the stats). Now it is updated daily, tricked out with surveys and pictures, and able to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Lord knows where else (Figure 9.6).

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Figure 9.6 Charlotte Law Library News homepage

Many of the posts are adverts for the library, but some—Mary Susan Lucas’s article on finding North Carolina forms, for example—are useful to any librarian. Oh, and make sure you check out the original comic strip, Murphy’s Law School, written by yours truly and drawn by librarian Kim Allman.

Law Library Blogs (www.aallcssis.pbworks.com/w/page/1189465/Law-Library-Blogs) provides an alphabetical list of more than 200 law librarian blogs, each with the name of its host institution, and is updated once or twice a month (Figure 9.7).

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Figure 9.7 Law Library Blogs homepage

It is also worth your time to read attorney blogs—you will learn more about legal subjects and the practice of law, making you a more valuable law librarian. At the Top 100 Law and Lawyer Blogs (www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/library/the-top-100-law-and-lawyer-blogs.html), blogs are ranked within each of several categories: General Law, Law Professors, Law Students, Judiciary, Criminal Law, Corporate Law, Employment Law, Real Estate Law, Internet and Cyber Law, Environmental Law, Foreign Law, Legal Ethics, and Law Office Technology (Figure 9.8).

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Figure 9.8 Top 100 Law and Lawyer Blogs homepage

Training and Support

As I explained in Chapter 4, you will use Westlaw or LexisNexis for 75–80 percent of your research, so it is crucial to become an expert on them. The best way to do this is to take advantage of the abundant free training West and Lexis will offer you.

Westlaw User Guides

All Westlaw guides (www.store.westlaw.com/support/user-guide/westlaw/default.aspx) are full-color PDF files that can be printed or saved to your computer. The main guides consist of four categories:

There are also guides for WestlawNext, the newest offshoot of Westlaw (see Chapter 4), as well as other general technical and research support.

Westlaw Training

How do you want it—telephone, in-person, or self-paced? West offers all these options for Westlaw Training (www.store.westlaw.com/support/training/default.aspx). Telephone and in-person training are the best, but these have limits. West won’t pay someone to travel to your library once a week, of course, and the telephone trainers do have thousands of other clients to support.

Not to worry: The self-paced webinars are fantastic, too. For example, solo and small law firms can choose from 54 webinars—36 for Westlaw, 18 for WestlawNext—each about 30 minutes long. That is 27 hours of free Westlaw training. From there, you can move to the Government and Education and the Corporate and Nonprofit webinars, each giving you a different perspective on how a particular type of attorney uses Westlaw.

Westlaw Librarian Resource Center

The user guides and training options found in the Westlaw Librarian Resource Center (www.store.westlaw.com/support/librarian/default.aspx) were created with attorneys and paralegals in mind. West, however, understands the different needs of librarians, employing a Library Relations Team to meet those needs. These folks are librarians, not attorneys or salespeople; they know the pressures and problems you’re facing, and they want to help you solve these problems—using Westlaw, of course.

The best way to use the Library Relations Team is as consultants for specific projects you’re working on. The website, however, has some good general resources:

LexisNexis User Guides

LexisNexis User Guides (www.lexisnexis.com/literature/default.asp) can be found under Product Literature, and there are only nine of them—far fewer than West provides. Learning Lexis.com, however, is 40 pages long, and it covers the details of signing in, searching and viewing results, topics and headnotes (not the same as Westlaw topics and key numbers), Shepardizing, and special Lexis products such as Total Litigator and Transactional Advisor.

LexisNexis Training

Like Westlaw, Lexis has telephone, on-site, and webinar training (www.lexisnexis.com/custserv/Training). One unique program is the Paralegal Mastery Program, consisting of five telephonic modules of about an hour each. The modules are:

I completed these five modules early in my career and earned a certificate, which still hangs in my office. More important, I gained some paralegal-level skills, which have helped me at every stage of my career.

LexisNexis InfoPro

Lexis has catered to librarians longer than West, and it shows on the LexisNexis InfoPro website (www.law.lexisnexis.com/infopro), a rich collection of resources in six categories. Some of the resources are:

Associations

American Association of Law Libraries

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL; www.aall.org) is the premier professional association for law librarians. Early in my career, someone told me not to join AALL, hinting that it was a bunch of snobs and I wouldn’t get anything out of it. This was terrible advice! When I joined years later, I found the members to be smart and helpful, the annual meetings to be fun and educational, and the website to be chock-full of information. Their top three website resources are:

AALL.org also links to 31 regional chapter websites. The chapter sites are useful for the local links and information they provide. The best is the Washington, DC chapter (www.llsdc.org) for its Legislative Source Book, a clearinghouse of U.S. and state legislative and regulatory information.

Special Libraries Association

Though it caters to business and corporate librarians, the Special Libraries Association (SLA; www.sla.org) is concerned with some topics that cross over to law librarianship. The Resources tab links to Information Portals, Industry Reports, and other research on topics such as copyright, electronic licensing, digital libraries, budgeting, benchmarking, knowledge management, user training, and dozens of other areas relevant to law librarians.

Through Click University (www.sla.org/content/learn), members can take free webinars or enroll in one of three premium programs: competitive intelligence, copyright management, or knowledge management. Consisting of eight to nine courses each, the programs are expensive—around $4,000—but in-depth. “There is no other equivalent existing educational opportunity available,” claims the Click University website. Too true.

Endnotes

  1.    George Butterfield, “Is a JD Necessary for Law Librarians?” LLRX.com, June 25, 2007, accessed November 29, 2012, www.llrx.com/features/jdnecessary.htm.

  2.    See Stephen Young, “The Dual Degree: A Requirement in Search of a Justification,” AALL Spectrum 17, no. 3 (December 2012): 7–10.

  3.    As in, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, stating that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This law amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  4.    Tortious means “pertaining to a tort” (i.e., a wrongful act). Do not confuse it with torturous, meaning “causing torture,” or tortuous, meaning “twisting, winding.” Wrongful acts can be akin to torture, however, and many of them are twisted, but never mind—I have already gotten lost in this winding note.

  5.    Amy Burchfield, “Experience the World as an FCIL Librarian,” LISCareer.com, June 2006, accessed November 29, 2012, www.liscareer.com/burchfield_fcil.htm.

  6.    2011–2012 Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, accessed November 29, 2012, www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources/standards.html.

  7.    Young, “The Dual Degree,” 7–8.

  8.    A list of these is available at www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Careers/lawlibrarycareers/Education-Requirements/state.html.

  9.    10-Q refers to a company’s quarterly report, filed every 3 months with the SEC.

10.    LIBOR means London Interbank Offered Rate, the rate at which the world’s most preferred borrowers are able to borrow money.

11.    REIT stands for Real Estate Investment Trust, which is like a mutual fund for real estate.

12.    Young, “The Dual Degree,” 8.

13.    See Lisa Smith-Butler, “Cost Effective Legal Research Redux: How to Avoid Becoming the Accidental Tourist, Lost in Cyberspace,” Florida Coastal Law Review 9, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 293–346.