Let KCLL Be Your Guy/Gal Friday
By Barbara Engstrom
Imagine having a reliable, low cost, on-demand associate focused squarely on helping you with your legal practice. As a subscriber to the King County Law Library, you essentially have your very own legal associate at the touch of your phone or computer. Need a case from Westlaw, a section from a WSBA Deskbook or an annotated RCW section? We can quickly provide what you need. What about jury verdicts or Keyciting? We’ve got you covered. Do you have a thorny legal issue and are out of ideas? We can make recommendations from our wide array of print and digital resources and suggest customized searches.
The law library can even go one better. If you are short on time or legal research resources and need someone to do your research for you, we can make that happen too. With our Let Us Do Your Research service you can hand off your search query and leave the heavy lifting to our experienced research staff working with our extensive collection. This popular service has many very happy repeat customers.
If it’s been a few years since you’ve been a part of the subscriber program, you should take a look at all the new services and benefits we added for subscribers in the past few years. Our goal is to make it as easy and convenient as possible for you to use the law library services, even if you prefer not to come to one of our physical locations. Here’s a quick overview of what $100 per year gets you as a subscriber.
Remote Access to Lexis Digital eBook Collection
With our most widely-used member benefit, subscribers get remote access to our eBook collection. The digital library includes all the Matthew Bender and Lexis treatises from our print collection including gold standard, multi-volume treatises such as Corbin on Contracts, Page on Wills, Collier on Bankruptcy, Moore’s Federal Practice, and Powell on Real Property.
Within the larger collection we’ve carved out a special Washington Practitioner Collection which includes all our Washington specific content in once convenient place. This collection has all of the WSBA Deskbooks including the Family Law Deskbook, Real Property Deskbook, Civil Procedure Deskbook, and Appellate Practice Deskbook. Also included in the collection are: Employment in Washington: A Guide to Employment Laws, Regulations and Practice; Washington Business Entities: Laws and Forms; Washington Guardianship Law: Administration and Litigation; Washington Insurance Law; and Washington Law of Evidence among others. Lexis also has Washington-specific Practice Guides which are on par with Westlaw’s Washington Practice series. A few of the many titles available are: Washington Pretrial Civil Procedure, Washington Trial and Post-Trial Civil Procedure, and Washington Criminal Law.
In addition to the practice sets, we also have the Annotated Revised Code of Washington and the Washington Court Rules Annotated available for remote checkout. For those of you who, like me, are big fans of the KCBA Washington Lawyers Practice Manual, it is available for remote checkout by chapter for your convenience.
In addition to the aforementioned sets and treatises, our Lexis Digital eBook collection also includes the full ABA treatise collection. This wide-ranging collection spans all imaginable topics including many niche areas in over 600 volumes.
As one of our subscribers recently said:
I cannot tell you how incredibly helpful the Lexis Digital Library access has been over the past month. I have had to do a significant amount of research and I found everything that I needed as well as forms. Research and writing has always been the best part of my job as an attorney and this makes it so much easier for me to do both efficiently.
Let Us Do Your Research
For those times when you are running out of bandwidth and could use a helping hand, subscribers can take advantage of our Let Us Do Your Research service. For solo and small firm attorneys, it’s like having an on-demand, low-cost research associate who comes armed with tens of thousands of dollars of legal research resources.
Here’s a short description of the Let Us Do Your Research process. Subscribers submit research projects to us through our website. The first fifteen minutes of research is free as our staff reviews the request and determines: 1) if the question(s) fall within the scope of our expertise and our collection resources; and 2) if we can meet the request deadline. Once we determine that the question meets these parameters, the subscriber decides whether to use the service. The current rate for approved Let Us Do Your Research projects is $100 per hour, charged in 15-minute increments. Our researchers will limit the amount of time spent on the question to the predetermined amount. If the question takes less time than projected, we only charge for the time spent on the project. Subscribers receive a detailed research memo that includes references to the resources used, summaries of relevant caselaw as well as the full text of cases relied on in the research memo. This service is available only to subscribers. https://kcll.org/lexis-digital-library/
Here’s what some of our Let Us Do Your Research service users have said:
I presented a fairly complicated question and didn’t want to spend my time down the rabbit hole. I wanted a pro to help me avoid the hours I would have taken to get to first base. I got a call a day after I sent the question from a gentleman who asked perfect questions and engaged in a fruitful and interesting back and forth on the issue. Three days later I got a clearly written road map memo that got me where I needed and then some. Overall great experience. Thank you, money well spent.
Very helpful! The problem with being an older attorney sometimes is I forget about other potential legal avenues I might pursue. In this case your research reminded me of Restatement of Judgments 2nd which gave me an excellent argument to hopefully defeat collateral estoppel.
This is great and exactly what I was hoping for. As a solo practitioner who has zero staff, this type of assistance is invaluable. Thank you, again!
Get Documents Stat!
See a reference to a law review that looks favorable? Want to do a deep dive into an annotated court rule? Need to Keycite an important case? Subscribers get 5 free document deliveries per month. This can be a case, a section of a treatise, a law review article, or any other document we have in our collection. We’ll shoot you a copy of the requested material over email. For non-subscribers, document deliveries cost $25 per document. https://kcll.org/document-delivery/
Discounted Conference Room Reservations
We know that coming to the courthouse can be stressful in the best of times and is even more so post- pandemic. Many of you appreciate having a private, quiet place to use as a base of operations during trial or to strategize over the lunch break. Law library subscribers get discounted rates on the use of the law library’s conference rooms. Take some of the stress out of trial by ordering lunch in and having it delivered to your conference room.
The rate for subscribers is $20/hr and for non-subscribers is $35/hr. Reservations are generally for the lunch period which runs from Noon – 1:30 p.m. or all day which runs from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Conference rooms tend to book up quickly. Be sure to plan well in advance if you would like to reserve a conference room. https://kcll.org/reserve-a-conference-room/
Print Book Checkout
Subscribers who prefer to research with print materials are eligible to check out physical books. Our staff makes the process as easy as possible. If you know the title(s) you want, call or email us in advance, and we’ll have the titles ready and waiting for you on our holds shelf.
Your Law Library Guy/Gal Friday Awaits
Become a subscriber to take full advantage of all that the law library has to offer. Your on-demand associate is standing by to help you maximize your legal practice hours. To find out more about any of these subscriber services go to https://kcll.org/subscribers/. As always, please feel free to reach out with any questions to services@kcll.org.
