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24 Legal Information Alert 1 (2005)

handle is hein.lbr/leinfal0024 and id is 1 raw text is: 4hat's new in legal publications, databases, and research techniques Volume 24, No. 1 January 2005 Contents Online Legal Research Billing Policies Database Report New Sources Publishers 1 8 9 16 Index 16 Online Legal Research Billing Policies by Cynthia L. Brown Why should you care about online billing policies? With all of the work that librar- ians have to do, why stack up another mound of work on your desk? Why is a pol- icy for online legal research billing important to librarians? Are law firm finances even a part of the librarian's concern? Should we care about the firm's overall accounts and balances? The answer to these questions is YES, and more so, when it comes to usage costs for online research. Librarians must be actively involved in how much the firm uses, spends, and recovers for all online legal resources. If you have not been involved in these areas in the past, I strongly urge you to carefully consider getting involved to see how you can help the firm and the library. As librarians, we are always looking for an opportunity to market ourselves. Developing an online legal research billing policy is a great opportunity. With money issues, you can always get people's attention. As part of my research for overhauling our firm's online legal research billing policy, I posted a note on the law-lib listserv requesting sample online legal research billing policies. I asked for information on policies that detailed appropri- ate uses, privacy issues, how to bill or not bill for personal use, CLE presentations, and marketing. The responses I received were varied. I could see that the number of online legal research billing policies will be about the same number of law firms that have online legal research resources. In this arti- cle, I describe what I learned from the many variables there are for online research billing policies and how I used the results of my survey to develop our new policy. What I Learned from Law-Jib While some firms do not bill any online research, others bill all online research. In some policies, there was a distinct difference between flat-rate and pay-as-you-go contracts. Some policies included provisions for situations such as CLE presenta- tions, pro bono work, and personal use. In some policies, only the online services continued on page 4