Fantasy Island: There's a Legal "App for That" But Should Users Trust It?

More than once or twice, I've seen a local practitioner proudly display an app on his (no hers) iPhone for primary source materials in my little county law library and at the bar nearby (hey, it's called "networking" with your patrons.) I've given up asking the following questions:

• Who is the provider?
• Is it regularly updated?
• How do you know if it is accurate?
• Have you replied on the provided information in court?

As law librarians, we know how important all these questions are but past responses to my queries make it clear to me that practitioners aren't concerned about reliable and authenticated information. It appears on the display, it appears on the display!!! It's as if these app users are seeing "the plane, the plane" on Fantasy Island.

As a publisher, Jason Wilson has the same sort of response. In Fuck reliability. Screw authentication, he writes that "Jacob Sayward’s recent AALL Spectrum article, iCite: Legal Research? There’s an app for that has me all kinds of pissed off." Wilson adds:

[Sayward's] article is representative of reviewers of legal research products generally, and their unwillingness to question how accurate and reliable the digital content those publishers provide is, particularly statutory information. How hard is it to ask a publisher (if that is in fact what we consider apps developers to be) where they get statutes and the workflow processes they use to ensure the content’s reliability and authenticity.

To which I simply add: how hard is it for the editors of AALL Spectrum to instruct authors to beef up their submissions with at least a few words of caution if not a brief critical analysis since evaluation of legal information products and services is what we law librarians are supposed to do? Of course, if Sayward provided this expert analysis but it was cut by the editors to save advertising space (or insert the stock photo in the center of the piece), that would be an entirely different matter.

Do articles in AALL Spectrum have to be labeled "Perspective" to pose questions about products and services?

TRL’s pre-launch website provided few details about the new product. After the launch, TRL advised librarians to consult with their local account reps for more information. My rep, however, seemed ill-prepared to deal with questions. For example, how would new users affect the algorithm for document relevancy? How exactly does the algorithm work? Why isn’t there an upgrade to Westlaw.com? When will it roll out to students, law schools, firms, and government institutions? Will Westlaw.com cease to operate? How does this affect the OnePass migration? And most importantly, what will it cost? Some of these questions have been addressed by TRL; whether they have been addressed satisfactorily is left up to the reader.

Quoting from Jennifer Frazier's WestLawNext: Thomson Reuters Legal's Newest Prompts Questions for Librarians, AALL Spectrum (May 2010). [JH]