Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50905
When you open a tool box, you've got screwdrivers and hammers and they both join things. But if you try to use a screwdriver where what you really need is a hammer, it doesn't work well. You've got to understand what the different tools do. It sounds pretty basic, but that can save a lot of time. — Kathryn Arbuckle, John A. Weir Memorial Law Library, University of Alberta understand information very well. If you tell me what you're looking for, I'm sure I can fi nd it," he says. Michels believes the technology revolution that has made information so much more available has actually made fi nding the right material more diffi cult. Limited space in printed case reports used to force an editor to fi lter out the boring stuff and highlight the leading cases. "Now memory is cheap, you just put them all in. Th at puts a lot more onus on the students to be the ex- perts," he says. At the University of Alberta, Ar- buckle says students waste a lot of time by bringing a "Google search" mindset into the library. She says most library catalogues and databases don't work the same way as Google, so the results they want end up buried in ir- relevant matches. She says their cata- logue works more like the Yellow Pag- es, with resources grouped together by subject. Th e key, she says, is to un- derstand exactly how each search tool works. "When you open a tool box, you've got screwdrivers and hammers and they both join things. But if you try to use a screwdriver where what you really need is a hammer, it doesn't work well. You've got to understand what the diff erent tools do. It sounds pretty basic, but that can save a lot of time," she says. Mirando says he is sometimes tempt- ed to cancel Osgoode library's print subscriptions because so few students make use of them. Law fi rms, he says, are already closing their print libraries. "We have a summer student who was fi ling supplements into the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest for us. He said to me, 'I never knew it was a print publi- cation,' because he had always accessed it online," says Mirando. But there are some important exceptions to the no- print rule, he says. Most areas of law have a defi nitive text that Mirando says can work as a great shortcut in legal Untitled-1 1 C ANADIAN Lawyer 4STUDENTS F ALL 2010 23 7/27/10 12:09:06 PM