Check Out New Books @ KCLL (Without Ever Leaving Home)
By Barbara Engstrom
The law is a tradition-bound endeavor. Judicial decisions are constrained by long-established precedent (well, at least they used to be) as are the workings of the court. An attorney visiting the King County Law Library when it was first established in 1919 would not have felt too out of place in the law library (or courthouse) of 2019. Then came the pandemic [cue the sound of a record scratch] and we were all thrust into the future. Unlike public libraries, who had embraced eBook collections years ago, public law libraries were still tied to print collections. But not for lack of trying. For years I, and other law librarians, lobbied legal publishers to allow our patrons to check out eBooks and were always met with a resounding no. With the onset of the pandemic, Lexis quickly pivoted and created remote eBook access for public law library patrons. It was a game changer for KCLL and we proceeded to change the composition of our collection from almost exclusively print to primarily digital.
While we still maintain a very robust print collection, the addition of eBooks has allowed us to have an even bigger and more accessible digital collection. One of the best acquisitions that we made, in terms of expanding the scope and breadth of our collection, was the complete ABA digital treatise library.
Titles and Subject Areas Covered
The collection includes the quintessential ABA titles such as The Model Business Corporation Act, and The Annotated Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Along with these industry standards, you’ll also find concise, practitioner-oriented treatises that cover very specialized subject areas. For example, a search on the term insurance brings up dozens of titles on sometimes elusive research topics including:
- Construction Insurance: A Guide for Attorneys and Other Professionals
- Due Diligence of Trust-Owned Life Insurance
- Climate Change and Insurance
- Modern Captive Insurance: A Legal Guide to Formation, Operation, and Exit Strategies
- Commercial Crime Insurance Coverage
- No-Fault Insurance Anti-Fraud Litigation: A Practitioner’s Guide.
- Leveraging Life Insurance Premium Payments: Using Split-Dollar and Related Party Premium Financing Techniques.
**Notice that this search also brings up non-ABA books including the New Appleman on Insurance and the 13-volume Matthew Bender set that is the gold standard treatise for insurance law
The ABA eBooks also include a large collection of technical practice titles. A search on the term contracts brings up the following how-to books:
- Contract Drafting: Powerful Prose in Transactional Practice
- A Practical Guide to Commercial Real Estate Transactions: From Contract to Closing
- A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting
- Transaction Risk: A Legal Guide to Contractual Management Strategies
- The Tech Contracts Handbook: Cloud Computing Agreements, Software Licenses, and Other IT Contracts for Lawyers and Business People.
- Guide to Service Subcontract Terms and Conditions
**Notice that this search also brings up the non-ABA set Corbin on Contracts, a gold standard, multi-volume treatise set for contract law.
Insurance and contracts are just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of topics covered including administrative law, alternative dispute resolution, business law, criminal law, elder law and estate planning, government law, property law, disability law, and tort law just to name a few.
Best Way to Search
Generally, a keyword search from the home screen will get you good results. If, however, you don’t find what you are looking for, don’t give up. You can use the Browse feature to search over 80 subject areas and can limit your search by jurisdiction, practice area or content type (CLE, newsletter, court rules, treatise, deskbook, practice guide, or study aid.) Using the Subject search is a great way to uncover what a keyword search might miss. For example, a keyword search on slip and fall pulls no results but a subject search on Personal Injury Law will pull up the 28-volume treatise set: Personal Injury: Actions, Defenses, and Damages.
Find Out About the Book Before Check-out
Subscribers can check out five books at a time, with a lending period of 7 days. If you’d like to find out a bit more about the book before you check it out, click on the title of the book. From there you can click on Description to read a detailed synopsis of the treatise. Browsing through the Table of Contents can also be helpful to flesh out what is covered in particular chapters. You can drill down to a granular level in the table of contents and get into the text of the treatise by clicking on a TOC link — all before you check out the book.
You can also search within a book or treatise set as well. This is a very effective strategy to find all sections of the book containing your search terms, before checking it out. In your result list you will see short snippets of the relevant discussion of your search terms throughout the book and can quickly determine whether it makes sense to check out. For example, searching for the phrase “slip and fall” in Personal Injury: Actions, Defenses, and Damages pulled up references to slip and fall in 139 sections in 23 different volumes of the set.
What’s Recently Been Added to the ABA Collection?
Curious about new books in the ABA Collection? Lexis Digital makes it easy to keep up with recently added content. From the Browse Library link scroll down to the last category — Recently Added — to find the latest additions to the digital collection. Some of our most recent acquisitions include:
- The Insurer’s Duty to Duty to Defend: Issues and Analysis
- The Arbitration Conversation: Insights and Wisdom from Experts in the Field
- Litigating Adverse Possession Cases: Pirates v. Zombies
- Commercial Lending Law: A Jurisdiction-by-Jurisdiction Guide to U.S. and Canadian Law
- The Historic Tax Credit: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Technical Tax Issues
Along with these subject oriented books, there are a lot of professional wisdom and work-life balance books such as:
- The Trial Lawyer’s Guide to Success and Happiness
- How to be a Star Associate
- Leader Upheaval: A Guide to Client-Centricity, Culture Creation, and Collaboration
- Her Story: The Resilient Woman Lawyer’s Guide to Conquering Obstacles.
24/7 Subscriber Access
King County Law Library subscribers have round-the-clock access to not just the ABA collection, but the entire Lexis Digital database. Just visit our databases page and choose LexisNexis https://kcll.org/databases/. Your log-on is the email address you used when subscribing.
Not a subscriber? Not to worry. Come visit the King County law library in person in either location to access any of the eBooks in our collection. Better yet, become a subscriber and get access to our great books and services at the convenience of your home or office. To find out more about subscribing go to https://kcll.org/subscribe/.
Visit Us @ KCLL
If you have questions about the ABA eBook collection, becoming a subscriber, or any other law related topics, feel free to contact the law library at services@kcll.org.
