In addition, the younger crowd that I’m referring to are the new lawyers who just graduated from law school and already have substantial exposure to certain research systems such as Westlaw and Lexis. Most of them, however, are not familar with using other services outside of those two major vendors. For example, Courtlink, PACER, BNA, CCH, to name a few.

All of these services are valuable but not difficult to learn at all. Part of it is due to the fact that these services don’t have the same level of feature/function and search sophistication on par with Westlaw and Lexis.

That said, I always offer training (either by myself or the vendor) for new hires (associates, lateral partners and paralegals) and continous training with existing staff when necessary– all based on the fact that just because you can Google it doesn’t mean you can Yahoo.

The question is selecting the correct tool to fight the fire and be cognizant of the time and cost involved. This is when law librarians become most valuable as through interviews with the researcher we can “prescribe” the best approach for tackling a matter/project.