I wholeheartedly agree with you! One wonders what county court law
libraries' collection development policies will look like by the year
2000 if prices skyrocket like this. In the age of shrinking county
budgets, county court libraries may seriously have to consider "no
update" policies for virtually all treatises and looseleafs. And who
even knows if reporters and codes will continue to be affordable! Judges
will be affected by this, since they'll have to subscribe to Lexis or
(surprise!) Westlaw to get current information, which they will certainly
be hesitant to do since the average age of judges is probably greater
than the age of the original UNIVAC. Small firm attorneys and solo
practitioners will begin refusing cases because: a) they will not feel
comfortable branching out in to fringe areas because the information will
not be available, and b) if they charge the average client for the
research, the average client will become a pro se litigant. The general
public will be most affected. The courthouse library doors will
effectively be shut to them. Some might say that public law school
libraries should therefore pick up the slack. How fair is this when law
students are already in default of their loans and new students can
ill-afford to pay tuition hikes (remember all of the hullabaloo about
shrinking law school application??) Of course this is a worst case
scenario, but it would have been nice to have been consulted by AALL first.
Steve Anderson
(My opinions are my own)
Associate Law Librarian
Baltimore County Circuit Court Law Library
On Thu, 11 Apr
1996, Lyn J. Warmath wrote:
>
>
> I am concerned that I have not seen any responses on this list
> from AALL Executive Board members to the discussions of Kendall
> Svengalis's recent article outlining the repercussions of
> Thomson Corporation's possible acquisition of West Publishing.
> According to the article recently posted on this list, the
> Executive Board has decided not to take a public position about
> the proposed sale. I am baffled by this neutrality because the
> proposed purchase will in all likelihood have a profound effect
> on every one of us, our budgets, our institutions and our
> patrons.
>
> Svengalis warns that if the West/Thomson deal works, then
> Thomson will control:
>
> 100% of the national legal encyclopedias
> 100% of the annotated federal codes
> 100% of the commercial U.S. Supreme Court reporters
> 100% of the U.S. Supreme Court digests
> 80% of the national form sets
> 76% of the state legal encyclopedias
> Westlaw
> The entire National Reporter System, including state offprint
> reporters
> All West state, regional, federal and topical case digests
> Twenty annotated state codes
> A large share of the law school textbook market
> The West, LawDesk and Casebase CD-ROM products
> 50% of the major American legal treatises
>
> Disturbed by these percentages, individual members of AALL
> certainly can and have expressed their opposition to the
> proposed acquisition by communicating with the Department of
> Justice. But I do not understanand why our professional
> organization has not actively advocated for its members by
> opposing the acquisition, particularly when statistics show a
> history of huge price increases by Thomson. Annual
> supplementation to Lawyers' Coop's Am Jur2d was $584 before
> Thomson bought the company in 1989. Annual supplementation had
> nearly tripled to $1450-$1500 by 1994 and 1995. Shortly after
> Thomson created the new entity Clark, Boardman, Callaghan in
> 1992, supplementation frequency doubled for Couch on Insurance
> and costs rose from $133 in 1992 to $695 in 1995.
>
> I cannot help but wonder how AALL squares its neutral position
> with its Code of Ethics clause on a member's duty to minimize
> costs. According to the AALL Code of Ethics (AALL Directory &
> Handbook 1995-1996, page 362,) law librarians
>
> have a duty to society and the legal profession to work
> both individually and through their professional
> organizations toward improving the quality and
> minimizing the cost of the library component of the
> delivery of legal services.
>
> I worry that we may be selling ourselves short, along with the
> society and legal profession that our Code of Ethics
> champions. When our association chooses cooperation with legal
> publishers over objective, candid, courteous and effective
> consumer advocacy, there will be a huge price to pay. When AALL
> members do not press our association to advocate vigorously on
> our behalf, our institutions literally pay an enormous price
> for our complacency. When we, as a group, turn a blind eye
> to price increases way out-of-line with other consumer price
> indexes, we encourage publishers to take further advantage of
> our willingness to settle for so little.
>
> Lyn Warmath
> Hirschler, Fleischer, Weinberg, Cox & Allen
> Richmond, Virginia
> (804) 771-5605
>
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