Everyone (ok, everyone who is a law librarian and tweets) is tweeting about a blogpost by DC lawyer Jean O'Grady titled "The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training". It is well worth reading, if somewhat depressing. The basic premise is that focusing on "cost effectiveness" distracts summer associates from the real goal of legal research, which is finding the right answer for the client. The big database vendors could do a lot to gear their databases towards focusing on finding the right answer, rather than worrying about lots of tangential pricing factors - but they don't. Instead they offer highly complex, opaque and expensive research tool that in some ways defeats the real purpose of legal research.
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