Mary Grace Hune
College of William & Mary School of Law
mghune@lawlib.wm.edu

Brett Amdur
Villanova University School of Law
amdur@mail.law.vill.edu

How do we teach effective legal research in this age of multiple information formats? Mary Grace Hune will discuss the pilot research program she incorporated into the law school's Legal Skills simulated law firm environment. The project incorporated print research with electronic information retrieval using online databases, cd-rom, and the Web. Using FolioViews, she also showed the students how to use the computer to better manage the information retrieved by creating a "law firm" research database, case management system, and the beginnings of a litigation system.

As we all know, there has been much discussion lately about the merits of using electronic casebooks in law school. The debate, however, has typically failed to address the utility of using Folio Views as a means of allowing students to create *their own* electronic content. In this session, Professor Amdur will talk about a project that had this latter goal in mind. Specifically, last year all of Professor Amdur’s legal writing students were given laptop computers as part of a pilot program. In connection with this initiative, he developed a system for helping students use their laptops, or, more accurately, Folio Views, to organize the legal research they did on their appellate brief assignment. In this presentation, Professor Amdur will share his experiences with this project. He will demonstrate the Folio Views "template" created to make it easier for students to create their own infobases. He will distribute the written instruction booklet. Finally, we'll discuss things like student reaction to the project, the role that the system played in the learning process, how you can implement a similar project at your school, and other related issues.