‘I Just Need an Answer to a Simple Question.’
By Jim Calloway, Director, OBA Management Assistance Program

“I just need an answer to a simple question.” We have all heard that one.

When it comes from an unfamiliar voice on the telephone in the law office, this phrase roughly translates to “I would like some free legal advice from you, please, and I really have five or six questions, but this is a good way to get you started talking.” When it comes from one of your school-age children, it means that you are about to play a few rounds of “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader: Home Edition.” When it comes from your spouse or significant other, it means you should be ready for a question that is anything but simple, or worse, a question that is simple, but with potential answers that are complex and fraught with peril.

Is there any such thing as a simple question to a professional who might be charged with some sort of liability for answering a question incorrectly?

Well, this month we are not going to cover questions propounded to you. Rather we are going to spend a few minutes discussing how you can get instant answers to most of your simple questions. I hope this month’s readers will find this column to be life changing, even if that change is only giving you an extra five minutes per day.

But, first, let me tell you about Solosez. As a way of getting part of my online information, I participate in several electronic e-mail lists. One of these lists is called Solosez. Solosez is sponsored by the American Bar Association General Practice Solo and Small Firm Division and boasts 3,315 subscribers. Yes, you read that correctly, 3,315 subscribers and growing every week. These are almost exclusively solo and small firm lawyers and the list focuses on issues of interest to them. You can find out more about Solosez by visiting www.abanet.org/soloseznet.

There’s a lot of value in Solosez. People answer each other’s questions. People post obscure items of interest. People share their lives, sometimes sending extremely personal messages that end up in the inboxes of over 3,300 of their closest friends. If you are interested, you might give Solosez a try. Just don’t subscribe under your primary e-mail account. Because, while there is no charge for Solosez, it is not free. There is a cost in time invested. You will receive hundreds of e-mail messages per day. I firmly believe that the only way you can deal with Solosez in any rational manner is to set up a dedicated Gmail account for Solosez only. Then you can have the flood contained in a separate e-mail account and have the power to search through the pile using Google’s Gmail search tools.

Why am I mentioning Solosez? Because it and all of the other electronic e-mail lists operate the same way. You send an e-mail to one address and it ends up in dozens or hundreds (or 3,315) of inboxes. One e-mailer’s trash is another’s treasure and every person who has ever subscribed to a list has asked themselves the question, “Why on earth did that person send that question to the entire list?”

One negative aspect of online community interest groups is that people send totally unrelated and undesirable material to the collective. The problem of course is that each of us would define undesirable by our own standards.

The Oklahoma Bar offers OBA-NET free of charge to its members. It is based on the Web board model rather than an electronic mailing list. If the OBA has your e-mail on file, you can register for OBA-NET at www.oba-net.org.

So today I propose an answer to a question that has troubled me for years. Why would that person send that question to hundreds of people via e-mail when they could simply find the answer online themselves?

The irony is that they probably find it themselves as quickly as they can type the question and send the e-mail. So why bother hundreds of others? I have determined that part of the answer to my question is narcissism and laziness. It doesn’t bother some people to force hundreds of others to reach for the delete key if they can get what they need.

But, I now believe that most people simply don’t know they can now get instant answers to almost anything online or they don’t know how.

Many lawyers who can do superb digital legal research for their clients seem to not know how to do other online research. They can easily find precedents and cases, but cannot easily find the flash point of kerosene. (Oh, wait, that’s in 25 Oklahoma Statutes § 34 and the Oklahoma Constitution; bad example.)

So this month, let’s cover how to locate the answers to questions online. (Now I may be about to say things that my highly-trained law librarian wife and other librarians will disagree with, but she stopped reading my column years ago.)

So let’s start where every one of you would likely start anyway, if you thought about it: Google. I’m certainly not against traditional dictionaries. But why would you ever ask hundreds of people what a word or technical term means when you can just type it into Google? You’ve probably noticed that when you search for a single word in Google, right next to the number of results is a link to the definition.

For example, if I’m tempted to ask the members of my favorite electronic mailing list what exactly “ombudsman” means, I should do a Google search for the word first. OK, I get nine and a quarter million results in Google for “ombudsman.” But right next to that number is a link to the definition of the word. When I click on the link, not only do I get the definition and history of the word, but there’s a speaker icon where I can click and hear it pronounced. Before I leave this page let me scroll down a bit, and scroll and scroll. Wow! There is information on this word from 10 different sources, including Thomason Gale Law Encyclopedia and Wikipedia. The final entry is a series of translations of the word into other languages.

But let’s click back on the browser to return to the original page of results from our Google search. The first result is the Wikipedia entry for “ombudsman.” I click on that link to enter Wikipedia and go to “ombudsman” there. The main Wikipedia page for English speakers is http://en.wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia gets a bad rap in the legal community. The idea of a free online “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” just screams non-authoritative to lawyers. Certainly there have been a few well-publicized Wikipedia hoaxes. OK, some librarians should skip the next paragraph.

Wikipedia is a great source of information and all lawyers should be using it regularly, admittedly with a bit of caution. You can find extensive and detailed information on an amazing variety of topics, particularly if you want to understand some new pop culture phenomena or term that may not have even made into print dictionaries or encyclopedias yet. Now it is true that I wouldn’t stake an entire client matter solely on information I found on Wikipedia. But that’s true for most single sources. And even if you want to dismiss Wikipedia as non-authoritative, there’s a good chance that the Wikipedia treatment of a given topic will have links to other Internet resources that you would believe to be authoritative.

And, referring back to my original point, Wikipedia is quite likely to be more authoritative than the e-mails that you receive back in response to a query to an electronic mailing list. Given no other choices, I’d rather cite Wikipedia in a court brief, noting the exact date and time (in case the entry changes) and saving the original page as I found it, than cite “e-mail from Bruce Dorner, Londonderry, NH attorney (Aug. 7, 2008.)” I may know that Bruce is an expert, but will the court?

Wikipedia is the most famous of many, many wikis. (And if you don’t know what a wiki is, there’s a good chance to put this lesson into practice.) Some other wikis of interest include WikiHow, the “how to” wiki at www.wikihow.com, Wex from the Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute at www.law.cornell.edu/wex and JurisPedia, a worldwide law wiki, http://en.jurispedia.org.

One thing to understand is that popular wikis are quickly self correcting. True, someone may register as an editor and edit in some nonsense or off-the-wall statement. But there is a very good chance that, within a minute, someone else will fix it. Wikipedia is a great source for all sorts of reference material. As I noted in one of my blog posts earlier this year, if you want to see every song that made number one each week on the Billboard 100 for a given year or a recap of the 2000 NCAA football season, Wikipedia should be your first stop.

Wikipedia has been cited in more than a few appellate court opinions, which is probably a surprise to some. A Jan. 29, 2007, New York Times article, “Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively,” noted that trend. The article is still online at http://tinyurl.com/2xtekf, but the New York Times may still require free registration to access it. Wikipedia also has a table of court opinions citing Wikipedia as a source: http://tinyurl.com/395wcb.

We have focused on single word searches at this point. But veteran Internet researchers know that a search using several key words is more likely to get a result you want. So for really complex searches or when your first shot at Google doesn’t turn up what you need, take a few seconds to think of several words. Try to focus on unique words that have limited meaning. If you wanted to find a page, with words to a particular song, you wouldn’t want to use the term “words,” for example, but would want to search for “lyrics” along with the title. And if you wanted information about a book or song, you wouldn’t want to type just the title of the work into Google, you would want to enclose it with quotation marks so that the results would all have that exact phrase, not just some of the words.

But what about answers to other questions, you might ask? Entering a few search terms into a search engine may get you pages of results, but you really want the answer to a question, not an afternoon schedule of reading Web pages.

You might want to ask “What is the meaning of life?” for example. And, just so you know, Wikipedia does have an information page for that at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life.

But here’s a strategy. If you want the answer to a specific question, search for the first part of a sentence that would answer the question, enclosed by quotes. So search for “Niagara Falls is located” or “The death penalty is allowed.” Some times I even play Google Jeopardy, where I enter the question that I want answered enclosed by quotes. This will only give me a response where the author has rhetorically posed the question in the writing, of course. But it works a fair number of times.

Any phrase enclosed by quotes is more likely to get you the results you desire than a few keys words. But if that does not work, remove the quotes and try the same search again. You do have to be more cautious with these narrowly targeted searches and make sure that the Web site promoting the content is trustworthy. There’s probably some blogger somewhere who has posted that Niagara Falls is in Nigeria.

For more on online reference guides and resources, I strongly suggest checking out “Fun and Handy Reference Sites That Rock!” online at www.abanet.org/genpractice/ereport/vol7/num1/sitesforsoreeyes.html or http://tinyurl.com/562chm. My counterpart with the South Carolina Bar, Courtney Kennaday, and I have been writing out column “Sites for Sore Eyes” for the ABA GP|Solo Technology eReport for several months now and we really encourage you to read this last one for some great research sites.

If you want additional training on Internet research, check out the OBA/CLE Advanced Internet Research webinar scheduled for May 13. I will be co-presenting that one with Dallas attorney Tom Mighell, who was chair of ABA TECHSHOW 2008 and has been a past presenter at our OBA Solo and Small Firm Conference. We’ve got some great information prepared and you can get CLE credit online while seated in your home or office. Get more information or register online at www.okbar.org/cle/2008/2008-05-13seminarID903.htm or http://tinyurl.com/6fyt94.

Now, I know I may be discouraging some from e-mailing certain questions to electronic mailing lists or posting to other online community message boards. I don’t want to do that. For certain types of questions and for seeking the subjective opinions of others, there is simply nothing like a good electronic mailing list, or a Web board like OBA-NET. I get tons of wisdom from these groups of people who are willing to freely share their ideas, their opinions and their information. There has been a good deal of recent business literature written on the wisdom of crowds.

Originally published in the Oklahoma Bar Journal Arpil 12, 2008 - Vol. 79; No.10.