The study presents data and commentary on docket searching practices from a survey of 75 law school faculty and administration drawn from 56 law schools, predominantly in the USA.
The study looks closely at how law school faculty and staff evaluate the aid and training that they have received from their law libraries in maximizing their skills in docket searching, for state and Federal courts. The study gives precise data on what percentage of law school populations use popular and more obscure law docket searching applications, including but not limited to: PACER, Bloomberg Law Docket Searching, Docket Alarm, Westlaw Dockets and CourtLink, among others.
Just a few of this 50-page the report’s many finding are that:
Deans and administrators were the most self- critical about their docket searching skills with more than 60% feeling that their skills were deficient.
72.41% of the professors sampled said that they had never received any formal training in docket searching.
14.55% of those sampled had viewed a video or had some other form of formal training in searching state court dockets.