Serendipity in legal information seeking behavior

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of serendipity in legal information seeking behavior of family law advocates, whom act in a challenging information environment that lacks published court rulings. Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative research using a web-based structured questionnaire, among Israeli family law advocates. Single stage systematic sampling, with random starting point and no recurring pattern of each sixth family law advocate on the Israel Bar Advocates List, was applied. Data from 135 Israeli family law advocates were used for analysis. Findings – Electronic information sources were found as most serendipitous; family law advocates were identified as super encounterers; four types of professional background concerns and seven legal professional contributions of the unexpected encounters with court rulings, were identified. Furthermore, findings support several frameworks presented on earlier information encounter literature. Research limitations/implications – Data absence on demographic and professional variables distributions of Israeli family law advocates was a limiting factor, compensated by the systematic sampling method used, thus can be regarded to reflect the views of the entire study population. Surveys’ reliance on self-reporting recalls of serendipitous events is also a limiting factor, though predicted and acceptable in this matter since chance encounters occur unexpectedly and are complex to capture. Practical implications – Chance encounters may expose lawyers to meaningful information it is unlikely they were able to find because its limited publication, and assist them keep up with current law for better serves their clients. Originality/value – The study augments the current empirically based knowledge on serendipity and provides insights into legal information chance encounters among a little-studied group of knowledge workers: family law advocates.

Development of Online Legal Information System Lawyers Perceptions

“…Chowdhury 15 , et al also supported this with viewpoints that uncertainty is not limited to a cognitive state of the gap in knowledge. However, it may be correlated with difficulties relating to information seeking and retrieval of legal information, lack of awareness and unfamiliarity with sources of information.…”

“…Author of a research study opined that primary legal information should be available free to all, and this can be Further, a question was asked to describe their preferences for search operators. It is found that majority of academic lawyers opted for Boolean operator (122), followed by range operator (67), concept operator (55), proximity operator (43), fuzzy search operator (15), string wild card operator (14), wild card (14), query level (13), selectable truncation (11), not same operator (8), same operator (7). The preferences of practicing lawyers were different and majority of them asked for Boolean operator (83), followed by concept operator (37), range operator (35), proximity operator (26), query level (13), string wild card (10), wild card (7), selectable truncation (7), same operator (7), fuzzy search operator (7).…”

Exploring the information practices of lawyers

“…Lawyers, much like other occupations, may encounter knowledge gaps and a need for professional information when practising law (Solomon and Bronstein, 2015;Wilkinson, 2001;Van Opijnen and Santos, 2017). Cohen (1969) established that when dealing with a new issue, lawyers may operate in several ways: inspect the files and notes of previous cases they have dealt with that are relevant to the issue in question, seek the advice of their peers, transfer the case to another lawyer (for example, due to the case requiring different legal expertise), perform independent legal research using various sources of information, or, in the case of a lawyer in a large firm, delegate the required legal research to a junior associate.…”

“…Cohen (1969) established that when dealing with a new issue, lawyers may operate in several ways: inspect the files and notes of previous cases they have dealt with that are relevant to the issue in question, seek the advice of their peers, transfer the case to another lawyer (for example, due to the case requiring different legal expertise), perform independent legal research using various sources of information, or, in the case of a lawyer in a large firm, delegate the required legal research to a junior associate. Following Cohen's study, the research on this topic developed, one can list today studies on the information-seeking behavior of a wide range of legal practitioners, including judges (Mansour and Ghuloum, 2016), practising lawyers (Otike, 1999;Wilkinson, 2001;Solomon and Bronstein, 2015;Fagbemi, 2017;Jamshed, 2020), legal academics and teaching faculty (Khan and Bhatti, 2012;Makri et al, 2008), as well as law students (Kerins et al, 2004;Makri et al, 2006;Kadli and Hanchinal, 2015).…”

Serendipidade no contexto da Ciência da Informação: perspectivas para os estudos com sujeitos informacionais

“…Essas experiências de descoberta acidental de informação remetem ao conceito de serendipidade (serendipity), cuja temática ganhou importância na Ciência da Informação nos últimos anos (SOLOMON;BRONSTEIN, 2016), porém no Brasil é abordada ainda de maneira incipiente no cenário deste campo científico.…”