Information literacy in the legal workplace: Current state of lawyers’ skills in Pakistan

Abstract

This study investigated the current state of information literacy (IL) skills among lawyers practicing at the District Bar Association of Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan. A cross-sectional survey using a questionnaire was conducted to collect data from 297 lawyers. The questionnaire comprised 20 statements related to information literacy along with certain demographic variables. Each lawyer was personally visited in the assigned chamber by one of the researchers to record responses. Both descriptive (frequencies, percentages, mean scores, standard deviations) and inferential statistics (Pearson correlation coefficient, t-test, and one-way analysis of variance) were applied for data analysis in SPSS. The results showed that a large majority of lawyers participating in the survey never received any formal training concerning information literacy. However, most of these lawyers perceived IL skills as important in the context of their workplace especially in conducting legal research. These lawyers were more competent in the basic IL skills and less competent in advanced IL skills. In addition, the lawyers’ age, practical experience, practicing levels, computer proficiency, and English Language proficiency predicted their levels of IL skills. There was a critical need for the development of IL instruction programs for not only practicing lawyers but also for law students to improve their skills since these lawyers felt less competent with advanced levels of IL skills. It is hoped that the present study contributes to the existing body of WIL literature focusing especially on the role of IL in the context of legal work and outlining the current state of lawyers’ IL skills in Pakistan as no such study has appeared so far.

Effect of information literacy on lifelong learning, creativity, and work performance among journalists

“…This finding is also partially in line with the results of Zhang and Wang (2022) who reported that the investigative journalists recruited from different countries had average levels of information skills and literacy in the era of social media. However, this finding contradicted that of many other relevant studies in Pakistan addressing IL in other professional contexts such as scientists (Anwar, 1981;Naveed, 2022;Naveed and Rafique, 2018), investigation officers (Naveed and Kamran, 2022), lawyers (Naveed and Shah, 2022), teachers (Rafique, 2014;Santos and Oliveira, 2013) and librarians (Ali and Richardson, 2018) as these studies reported that the IL skills of the survey participant were not at the optimum levels.…”

“…Later on, Naveed (2022) and Naveed and Rafique (2018) addressed information literacy among scientists in Pakistan and reported that the scientists were good in basic IL skills and less comfortable with advanced IL skills. The recent studies by Naveed and Shah (2022) and Naveed and Kamran (2022) assessed the IL skills of lawyers and investigation officers respectively and reported that the IL skills of the survey participants were not at optimum level. An inquiry by Sasikala and Kumari (2013) highlighted an increased role of information in the industry and reported the current state of IL initiatives at workplaces in India.…”

“…There is a phenomenal increase in the research on workplace information literacy (WIL) in the last decade. Researchers have investigated several professional settings to explore the IL experiences and practices, such as web workers' experiences of IL (Abid, 2004; Abdi and Bruce, 2015), lawyers' practices of IL (Gasteen and O'Sullivan, 2000; Golenko and Siber, 2017; Naveed and Shah, 2022), barristers' IL challenges (Binsfeld, 2019), nurses' experiences of IL (Bonner and Lloyd, 2012; Forster, 2015; Sharma Pant and Poudel Panthi, 2018) firefighters' IL practices (Lloyd, 2004) IL skills of scientists (Donnelly and Craddock, 2002; Naveed and Rafique, 2018; Naveed, 2022), Police officers (Al-Daihani and Rehman, 2007; Kilic, 2010; Naveed and Kamran, 2022), and social workers (Crawford and Irving, 2009). There were only a few studies that have addressed information literacy in the context of journalists' workplace (e.g.…”

Information Literacy as a Predictor of Work Performance: The Mediating Role of Lifelong Learning and Creativity

“…The IL value creation is dependent on how well workforce perform in the workplace, particularly in environmental scanning, managing information, and research and development and the quality of information, follow [8]. IL builds the capacity of the workforce in undertaking information-related tasks, making the best information use along with its judicious interpretations and adopting an appropriate information behavior, and making an informed decisions to achieve organization goals [9][10][11]. Therefore, the corporations needed to become information literate to monitor new, unique, and prevailing trends in the market and develop such products which had potential to meet market needs.…”

“…With the voluminous growth of information and the realization that the organization must have to deal with it, the information literate workforce is essential to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Therefore, IL research in workplace context has not only witnessed growth in the last decade but also gaining a phenomenal momentum [1,2,11]. Of the seminal works, Ref.…”