At my firm I have been head of the Library Committee for a couple of years. About the only controversial issue we have faced was a few years back when we switched from Lexis to Westlaw for our exclusive online research. One or two lawyers were rabid Westlaw users and argued strenously for Westlaw based on the fact that it had headnotes, whereas Lexis did not (and we wound up selecting Westlaw). I think Headnotes can be useful, but not to the extent that the pro-Westlaw forces often suggest.
To me, online legal research is about Boolean searching. That's it. Headnotes are irrelevant to proper Boolean searching. The pro-headnote forces will suggest that headnotes somehow enhance Boolean searching. That may be true in specific instances, but overall it is not true. For every example of a headnotes being helpful you can find a counter-example of them being misleading. But, that said, I do find the digest system to be useful in book form. I use the book digests and headnotes when I want to quickly grasp an area of law that I am not familiar with (after, of course, checking statutory materials if they exist). To try to scan digest online is not something I have had much success with (mostly because it takes too long to load the various pages I want to "scan"). I think headnotes are vastly overrated, and the overrating is based on the views of people who are simply clinging to a familiar method of research.
12:01:27 PM
