Lawyers use of the Internet: an Australian study

Citation

Burgess, S. (1998), "Lawyers use of the Internet: an Australian study", Internet Research, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.1998.17208aaf.002

Lawyers use of the Internet: an Australian study

Lawyers use of the Internet: an Australian study

Researcher: Sue Burgess, Department of Information Studies, University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia.

E-mail: sue.burgess@uts.edu.au

Lawyers are increasingly being exhorted to make use of the Internet. A number of reasons are advanced such as: their clients are already on the Internet; competing law firms are on the Internet; discussions among lawyers about legal issues are taking place on the Internet; and the Internet provides access to a rich and varied collection of sources which might otherwise be unavailable to many lawyers (Martin, 1994). An additional argument in favour of Internet use particularly by Australian lawyers is given by Hutchinson (1995). She discusses the increasing internationalisation of Australian law and its effects on the legal research process. Hutchinson attributes the easy availability of decisions from other jurisdictions by electronic means (e.g. Lexis, and, more recently, the Internet) as being at least partly responsible for this change. She argues that technology is changing the way lawyers do research.

McClure et al. (1991) have argued that user-oriented research is needed to provide a better understanding of how computer networks can facilitate the goals of a specific user community and the problems these groups face in their attempt to use networks to accomplish their goals.

There is a growing number of studies whose primary focus is a group of Internet users as opposed to the Internet itself. Many of these studies look at the broad purpose various groups of users have for using the Internet, but few studies look at the actual impact or benefit users derive from using the Internet. This is particularly the case for lawyers, where there is little research showing the impact of use of the Internet on legal practice.

The emphasis in this study is on exploration and description in order to understand what lies behind a phenomenon (lawyers' use of the Internet) about which little is known (Miles and Huberman, 1994; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). It operates on the premise that "understanding emerges most meaningfully from an inductive analysis of open-ended, detailed, descriptive, and quotational data gathered through direct contact with ... participants" (Patton, 1990, p.119).

The aims of the study are to investigate:

1. 1.

   What Internet services lawyers use?

2. 2.

   What outcome lawyers expect from the Internet session?

3. 3.

   How useful is/was the outcome of the Internet session?

4. 4.

   What impact does the use of the Internet and its output have on lawyers' legal research and practice?

"Usefulness" here refers to the judgment a user makes when comparing the outcome of use of the Internet with their original need (Frei and Schauble, 1991, p. 155). Usefulness is sometimes also referred to as "utility" (Cooper, 1976, p. 367; Schamber et al., 1990, p. 759). "Impact" here refers to user judgments about benefits, effects or changes as a result of using the Internet. Impacts may be short-term or long-term.

A purposive nonprobability sample has been chosen using the snowball technique aimed at providing the greatest opportunity to gather the most relevant data about the phenomena under investigation; namely, the range of behaviors demonstrated, and attitudes held by lawyers using the Internet in the course of their work. The sample will be ten to15 lawyers working in Sydney, Australia. This should be sufficient to find patterns and relationships in the data. To date, data have been collected from about half the sample.

A particular feature of the data collection for this study is the use of self-administered taped diaries over a period of a week while participants are conducting Internet sessions. The decision to ask respondents to record Internet sessions on tape while they were being conducted was taken to minimise participant's time; maximise recall and thus increase the amount of relevant evidence available for analysis, allow the participant to control the speed and amount of data collected and eliminate the possible effects of an outsider present. It is felt that these benefits will outweigh the disadvantages of this method of data collection, e.g. lack of control of the data collection and possible poor quality recording. At this stage in the data collection this has proved to be the case, although there has been a higher than expected number of technical problems associated with the use of the tape recorders. At the end of the week, the tape is collected and a face-to-face interview conducted in order to provide participants with the opportunity to give overall comments about their use of the Internet and for the researcher to probe/clarify or amplify diary entries.

An interpretive content analysis approach will be taken to the analysis of the data. Descriptive codes will be generated from the data collected. Patterns and themes will be identified and codes clustered into higher level analytic codes in a hierarchical structure (Krippendorff, 1980; Miles and Huberman, 1994).

This particular study has had to take a number of ethical issues into account, among them the sensitive commercial nature of the data and the amount of participant's time in an environment where lawyers are encouraged to maximise the proportion of their work which is charged out to clients.