Attorneys desiring to stay current with their clients' interests, frustrated at not being able to locate the required volume, or listed at the bottom of the route slip will lobby for other formats that give them better access. The sense of the participants at this meeting was that presently users are very few, but potentially usage will increase although no one knows how soon this shift will actually occur. While the library or research staff is expected to know how to access Web subscriptions, the participants at the meeting believe that the power users are already very computer-literate and comfortable with Internet protocols. This means that some attorneys and paralegals actually do use a subscription consistently. People who have used the CD-ROM version are more likely to be successful switching to the Web version.
Training can be an issue.
To the library staff, however, the difference between assertions of user-friendly or intuitive programs and the actual problems encountered are very genuine and often time consuming. Attorneys, and to a lesser extent, librarians, do not want to wait very long for an Internet connection to be established or to spend a lot of time learning yet another new search terminology and strategy. The sophistication and proprietary structure of a product may work against it on the Internet. Often a paper edition has to be retained for occasional users. Assumptions were that savings were in staff time because information did not have to be updated or routed manually.