lawyer

T. R. Halvorson is a lawyer in sole practice in Sidney MT President of Pastel Programming Co. and author of How to Avoid Liability: The Information Professional's Guide to Negligence and Warranty Risks and Legal Liability Problems in Cyberspace: Craters in the Information Highway .

Make a date with LOIS. She has a great personality.

Now wait! She's good looking too.

She's got plain durable good looks without a lot of cosmetics.

She has a good memory is multi-talented and has a lot of friends.

And hey as fun as she is she's not a high-rent date.

I like LOIS well enough that I could wish to write a whole review in that metaphor. The trouble is I hemmed myself in by something I already said. Elsewhere I have written that searchers are responsible for quality in the Web world and proposed that we publish SCOUG-inspired quality evaluations of selected Web resources. 1 Now I have to practice what I preach.

LOIS is a subscription legal research library on the Web provided by Law Office Information Systems Inc. LOIS provides comprehensive law libraries for 32 state and federal jurisdictions and is actively adding new databases every month. For a number of the other 18 states the libraries are started but not yet comprehensive. State libraries include case law statutes administrative codes court rules jury instructions attorney general opinions and other materials.

• it provides one-stop shopping for multiple jurisdictions
• it supports multi-file searching
• the backfiles of state case law are much deeper than on any free Web site and in some instances they go back farther than any other electronic source
• the search engine is reasonably capable and the search syntax is fairly obvious for professional searchers
• all of the cases and statutes on the site are hyperlinked
• pricing and subscription options can be attractive for smaller firms

The earliest full-orbed view of quality and value of information in the electronic age I can find is the work of the 1990 annual retreat of the Southern California Online Users Group (SCOUG). The retreat produced the SCOUG Rating Scale a framework for judging performance in ten broad categories: consistency coverage and scope timeliness accuracy/error rate accessibility/ease of use integration output documentation customer support and training and value-to-cost ratio. 2 The SCOUG Rating Scale has proven sturdy as we moved into the Web world and has inspired a number of rating scales adapted to Web resources. My proposal to publish SCOUG-inspired evaluations of selected Web resources would be ridiculous for many legal research sites: they aren't worth rating. While viewing LOIS through SCOUG lenses reveals her blemishes at least this is a resource worth looking at that closely.

Consistency

Searching LOIS follows the same general rules from file to file. LOIS obtains court opinions directly from the courts but neatly reformats them as ASCII text. This makes them more attractive than the way they look as typed by the courts and it gives a consistent look and feel from file to file. LOIS consistently adds value by providing parallel citations. LOIS supports field or segment searching with a fairly consistent field structure. For my state Montana one may search: all fields official citation parallel citation appellant and appellee names docket number appellate court argued date released date case topics (headnotes) judge and court appealed panel majority opinion concurring justice concurring opinion dissenting justice and dissenting opinion. The search page for every case law file displays the searchable fields in one column of a table with text boxes to enter search terms in the next column. This self-documenting approach reduces the inconveniences of any differences in field structure. If a court includes headnotes as part of its official decision LOIS includes them .

Coverage and Scope

Although documentation is a separate category in the SCOUG Rating Scale I have to say something about it here so you can understand the limitations and probable defects in what I am about to report on coverage and scope. There is a serious flaw in the documentation of LOIS' coverage and scope. LOIS has a central page documenting the coverage of all files but it's badly out of date and does not say when it was last updated. For example the system's comprehensive coverage for 19 states is completed and for 29 states is started but the centralized coverage page only lists 24 states. It does not list any of the states whose libraries are started and useful though not yet comprehensive. My state Montana is not listed although LOIS has a good start on Montana materials. To find out for sure what LOIS covers you have to navigate to the search page for a particular database where fortunately there always is a Currency command button at the top of the page. LOIS generates the information on the currency page displayed by clicking that command button automatically every time the file is updated. At least there is some good news in this: overall coverage is better than the centralized page reports. Understand though that I chose not to run all over the system to verify the true extent of coverage; I report here on the basis of the centralized page.