Stephann Makri: S.Makri@ucl.ac.uk. Tel. +44 20 7679 5242. Fax +44 8456 382 573. Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources. However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users' behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis's -by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as 'updating' (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis's model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours. Keywords: information-seeking models, HCI, legal, attorney, digital library, behaviour, Ellis Information-seeking is an important part of lawyers' work and unlike many other professions, the legal profession has access to many dedicated electronic resources. Notable examples are the high-profile commercial platforms LexisNexis and Westlaw (which are commonly referred to by the legal profession as legal databases, but can also be considered to be digital law libraries). Despite access to these resources, lawyers often find legal information-seeking difficult, making them interesting to study. Much of the problem might lie with the fact that digital law libraries have traditionally been regarded as difficult to use. In one of the few user-centred studies on digital law libraries, Vollaro & Hawkins (1986) conducted interviews with patent attorneys at the AT&T Bell Laboratories, focusing on their information search behaviour. Nearly all attorneys mentioned difficulty in finding appropriate search terms and remembering the special features of each resource, especially when use was infrequent. Other problems were not knowing when all possible avenues had been pursued and forgetting commands. In another user-centred study, Yuan (1997) monitored the LexisNexis Quicklaw searches of a group of law students over a year and found the experience did not result in reduced errors or increased error-recovery. Yuan also found that some commands were rarely or never used, but law students were able to accomplish many tasks by knowing only a basic set of commands. Whilst this may allow lawyers to 'get by,' we argue that there is a need to improve the design of these resources in order to better support lawyers and their work. In order to improve the design of digital law libraries, and closely related to one of the motivations of this special issue, we suggest the need to develop a better understanding of lawyers' informationseeking behaviour with existing systems. One way of achieving this understanding is by using theoretical information-seeking models as lenses for the identification, analysis and description of their behaviour. In the remainder of this paper we highlight that many models (including Leckie et al.'s (1996) model which examines the behaviour of lawyers) analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction. We suggest that whilst this may lead to broad design insights for interactive systems, richer data and detailed design insights can be gained by using models that analyse data at a lower-level of abstraction.
Makri et al REF extended this work, focusing on the information behaviours observed within the legal profession.
Investigating the Information-Seeking Behaviour of Academic Lawyers: From Ellis’s Model to Design
Information Processing and Management
Computer Science