In a recent article from www.law.com, Tricia Kasting writes that before the Internet became the primary resource for research, attorneys had to work harder.



While this might not sound that much different than the grandpa who spins yarns about having to walk six miles to school in the snow, Kasting claims that the framework of printed materials better prepares the mind for the challenges of legal research.





She writes:



"Print legal research has the advantage of an imposed conceptual framework of source materials and subject classification. It takes practice and time to learn how the system works, but once learned provides comprehensive research methodologies.



Query searches locate and retrieve relevant documents that, in a conceptual subject framework, may not appear related. Toss in electronic subscription databases and the World Wide Web, and the research process takes place in an open system that has a flexibility print can't match."



The vastness of the Internet as a medium doesn't focus the brain the way old fashioned research does, according to Kasting.