Standard forms are helpful practice aids for lawyers and effective training tools for law students. Some jurisdictions require use of official forms in certain circumstances. Most forms, however, are mere guidelines. Proper use requires legal expertise. Local laws vary. The careful drafter must choose the right form, verify its accuracy and completeness, update it for changes in the law, and tailor it to a particular case or jurisdiction. Never use forms blindly. The importance of applying independent legal judgment cannot be overemphasized.

Perhaps the best tool for finding form books in Cumberland’s Law Library is the online library catalog. To retrieve general form books, try a call number search (c/form book) for form book or a word search (w/forms law) for forms law. For focused resources, use more specific categories. For example, a quick subject search for instructions to juries yields a list of sources for pattern jury instructions. Experiment with keyword searches combining terms like forms, drafting, structuring, pattern, checklists, or clauses with appropriate subject indicators such as wills, bankruptcy, contracts, or other descriptors. To find books with companion computer disks, add the term disk or disks to your search query. In turn, combining search queries with geographic names retrieves state-specific form books, for example forms Georgia or forms Alabama.

Publishers compile model forms in many formats. Some form books focus on specific jurisdictions or subjects. Others are encyclopedic collections covering a broad range of topics. Look for encyclopedic form books in the Practice Section on the First Floor. For litigation-oriented forms like complaints or motions, consult American Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms Annotated. This set contains forms for use in both federal and state judicial and administrative proceedings. Federal Procedural Forms, Lawyers Edition is keyed to federal civil, criminal, and administrative practice. Accompanying checklists, drafting guides, annotations, and tax notes are particularly noteworthy. When drafting legal documents like contracts or deeds, refer to American Jurisprudence Legal Forms 2d. Arranged by substantive area, West’s Legal Forms covers both transactional and litigation-oriented matters. West’s Federal Forms are geared to practice before federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court, courts of appeals, district courts, bankruptcy, and admiralty courts.

Treatises, shelved on the Second Floor by call number, may include forms along with analysis of the law. Use the online library catalog to find sample forms on subjects like bankruptcy, business organizations, discovery, wills, UCC, and others. One comprehensive transactional guide is Current Legal Forms: With Tax Analysis [KF170/.R3]. This 33-volume set, edited by Rabkin and Johnson, covers a broad range of business topics.

The Law Library’s collection includes many Alabama specific form books. For example, Howell’s Alabama Civil Practice Forms, 3d ed. [KFA530/.A65/H6/1997/Reserve] cover both litigation and transactional matters ranging from general pleadings to wills and trusts. In the Southeast Transaction Guide: Florida, Georgia, Alabama [KF1410/.S6/Reference], analysis of the law is enhanced with forms covering business, estate planning, real estate, family law, and other topics.

Electronic forms are a boon to legal drafters. Instead of retyping or scanning printed forms, save time by downloading forms (or copy and paste) for later editing. Both Westlaw and Lexis offer significant collections of forms. Westlaw coverage includes American Jurisprudence Legal Forms 2d, American Jurisprudence Pleading and Practice Forms, West’s Legal Forms, Nichols Cyclopedia of Legal Forms, and many others. Westlaw’s AmJur sets alone contain approximately 60,000 forms. On Lexis, look for online versions of Bender’s Federal Practice Forms, Bender’s Forms of Discovery, Rabkin and Johnson’s Current Legal Forms, and the Southeast Transaction Guide among others.

For more information, visit the Cumberland Law Library at http://lawlib.samford.edu. Follow the link for "Research Aids" for a pull-down menu of library research guides. Our Web-based Guide to Form Books covers encyclopedic form books, form books by subject, and Alabama form books. Ask a reference librarian for help if needed.

[This bibliography is an update of one that appeared in the March 2002 issue of Check It Out.]

Remember to save your documents to a disk, CD-ROM, or jump drive. Any documents saved to a lab computer’ s hard drive will be deleted. Save your work frequently to a disk as the computer may freeze and it is often difficult to retrieve a document after the program has crashed. Be sure to take a look at the Law Library Computer Services Usage Policy to familiarize yourself with user responsibilities.

It is also important because nothing may be saved on the hard drives of the Law Library lab computers and laptops. A protection, DeepFreeze, is loaded on each computer that prevents anything from permanently being saved to the hard drive.

Be sure to keep track of your Law Library print account. This information can be found by pointing your mouse over the dollar sign in the system tray of each lab computer. Please don't be alarmed if the amount reads $3.57 rather than 357. This is a technical problem that is being worked on. As long as it doesn't have a minus sign in front of the number, there are still pages in the print account.

If you have any questions, contact Grace Simms, Computer Services Librarian at 726-2687 or glsimms@samford.edu.

Martindale-Hubbell (http://www.martindale.com)

FindLaw: West Legal Directory (http://lawyers.findlaw.com)

Legal Directories Publishing Company, Inc.(http://www.legaldirectories.com)

The constraints on any library collection’s size are both physical and fiscal in nature. While any operating library strives to improve its collection, it cannot hold everything that could conceivably be needed by its users due to space limitations. At the same time, budget considerations play an enormous role in limiting collection size as well; librarians must prioritize purchasing those publications (and database services) which will most likely meet the requirements of its primary patron population--in our case, the academic needs of the students and faculty of the Cumberland School of Law. Given these constraints, a library collection cannot meet all potential demands of researchers at all times. What options are available to a researcher when the library does not hold needed books?

INTERLIBRARY LOAN

Upon request, the Law Library will borrow books and articles from other institutions without charge to the borrower under certain conditions. Such requests are limited to the following circumstances:

1) Interlibrary loan requests can be made by Cumberland students and faculty for law school-related academic purposes.1

2) Materials requested must be identifiable – in other words, the information provided by the researcher must be sufficient to allow a librarian to order a specific item. A request such as “a book on Chapter 11 bankruptcy” will not suffice. Normally, the interlibrary loan librarian will need an author (or editor) as well as the title and edition for a book. Additional information such as year of publication and ISBN number are also helpful. For periodical articles, title of the periodical and the article are necessary; volume, issue and page number and date information is needed as well.

Researchers must also consider the time lag involved in the ILL process; an average waiting period after making a request is 10 days. Once the book is received, a normal due date will be 3-4 weeks later. While a renewal of an interlibrary loan can be attempted, it is solely in the discretion of the lending library.

LOOKING BEYOND INTERLIBRARY LOAN

Given the constraints of the interlibrary loan process, there are times when other options must be considered by researchers. One option that may be very attractive to the desperate researcher with little time to spare is to find the book at another library in the Birmingham area. A reference librarian can be helpful in making such a determination. At the same time, technology is making this task more “self-service.” A good starting point is Samford University Library’s homepage at http://library.samford.edu. From this screen, choose “Articles & More.” You will then click on “W” of the alphabetical listing and choose “Worldcat.” The Worldcat database is OCLC’s FirstSearch, a truly wonderful tool for locating libraries holding a specific book and also identifying books on a particular subject.2

If you already have specific title or author information about a book, you may enter the appropriate information in the title and/or author fields of the initial FirstSearch screen and click “search.” The resulting screen will reveal a list of materials which match the search request. After choosing the appropriate item on the list, click on “Libraries Worldwide” for that entry to reveal a list of libraries holding the requested book.3

When a researcher does not have the name of a book on the needed subject (or needs more books on point), the “keyword” entry field should be used; you may type in keywords associated with your subject which are likely to be included in a book’s title or subject heading. Do NOT enter an author’s name in this field unless it happens to be part of the title – this information can instead be entered in the author field, located below the keyword field. Afterwards, click “search” and you will be presented with a list of specific bibliographic titles that cover your keyword search criteria. After choosing a particular title from the list, you can also find a listing of the libraries holding the book by clicking on “Libraries Worldwide.”

BUYING A BOOK

Another option attractive to some researchers is to purchase the book. This option may be viable if you need the book for a long period of time, the vendor’s delivery capability meets your needs, and the costs involved are within your budget. Local bookstores may occasionally have desired legal research materials; however, Internet retailers are a more likely resource. The most obvious online option, Amazon.com, can be a good choice, if only for looking at reviews of the book.4 Another great website is bookfinder.com, essentially a database organized by a consortium of bookstores and other book vending websites.

A FINAL THOUGHT

In making such choices when research time is critical, a researcher’s best resource is a librarian. They can weigh the different options and perhaps think of other alternatives for finding the needed information (such as using online databases). Please contact a reference librarian at Beeson Law Library for help in this area. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1 If your request does not meet the requirements of interlibrary loan at Beeson Law Library, you may wish to contact your local public library’s interlibrary loan service department; this public service usually has equal ILL capabilities to those of the Law Library.

2 FirstSearch is perhaps the easiest, quickest way to find a book on point. However, there are numerous other paths to such bibliographic searching. Footnotes contained in law review articles on point, published bibliographies, as well as Law Books in Print (First Floor, East Wall) are among the possible sources of book titles covering a topic.

3 Please note that while this database lists libraries owning the material, it does not reveal the likelihood of the book being present on a library’s shelves. Searching the specific library’s catalog on the web (if available) or calling that library directly are ways of determining a book’s circulation status.

4 See related article “Need a Laugh? Read Amazon’s Book Reviews for State Rules of Court”.

The FBI recovered a valuable copy of the Bill of Rights that had been missing for 138 years. The document was stolen from the North Carolina Statehouse by a Union soldier during the Civil War. Read the story at: http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/19/bill.of.rights/index.html.

Next time you are down in the dumps, you might try going to amazon.com and reading the book reviews for INDIANA RULES OF COURT: STATE AND FEDERAL, 2000. The reviewers find meaning in the text that the typical attorney or student does not see. There are nine reviews of the book, each having a unique analysis. Here are a few of their thoughts:

“This frustrating novelization of the blockbuster Indiana Jones trilogy leaves a lot to be desired.... In Kafkaesque style, it’s never really made clear (despite a whole chapter on venue) where the novel is set.... With such a draconian and racist legal system, it is a wonder the Third Reich collapsed.”

“...Critical acclaim and commercial success have rendered the author lethargic in his prose. Apparently he is interested more in cashing a big paycheck than producing memorable literature....”

“...A book neither to be put down nor read, Indiana’s monumental rules apply not only to court, but also to life, love, the pursuit of food and, to quote the author, ‘as otherwise provided by the law....’”

“...[This] is no Grisham - the prose here is stilted, the characters are leaden. The work wanders from one topic to the next, as if written by committee....”

“A delicious romp, just the right mixture of suspense, pathos, romance and humor....Bravo Indiana! I can’t wait for the next installment.”

And finally, one reviewer interpreted the text as music:

“The boys are back – to some extent! The first song, “Introduction,” completely rocks.... Later on, though, things kinda get bogged down. The band can’t figure out what it wants to say, especially on the truly awful “Summary Judgment....

Maybe we’ll all look at the ALABAMA RULES OF COURT 2003 a little differently now!

Read a good book lately? Listed below is a list of the Ten Greatest Law Books, from A Book of Legal Lists (KF387/.S39). Each title listed can be found in the treatise collection. To find the call numbers, search the online library catalog at http://library.samford.edu/gateway01/english.

1. The Federalist (1788)

2. James Kent, Commentaries on American Law (1826-1830)

3. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833)

4. Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (1868)

5. Christopher Columbus Langdell, A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts (1871)

6. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law (1881)

7. Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

8. Jerome N. Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930)

9. James C. Carter, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function (1907)

10. Richard A. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (1973)

At the request of public officials or legislators, Alabama’s Attorney General may issue written opinions interpreting state law. Although not binding precedent, the opinions are often persuasive authority. Visit the Attorney General’s web site for a free full text database of all opinions – formal and informal – from 1979 to date. Search by keyword, phrase, opinion number, date, name, and more. After the search engine returns a summary of opinions matching your query, click on the opinion number for the full text in Adobe PDF format. To find a document by opinion number, use a three-digit designation, dropping any preceding zeros. For instance, to retrieve a document cited as Opinion No. 99-00280, choose the year 1999, and enter the number as 280.

For a printed version, see the Quarterly Report of the Attorney General in the Alabama Section on the First Floor. Until late 1999, the printed report contained formal opinions in full text, with informal opinions in table format only. Presently, the printed report contains abstracts, not full text of opinions, with no distinction between formal and informal. Thus, for opinions issued since 1979, the Attorney General’s web site contains more information than found in the official Quarterly Report. In similar fashion, both Westlaw and Lexis have a database of Alabama Attorney General Opinions, but neither includes the full text of opinions previously designated as informal. If needed, ask a reference librarian for help finding attorney general opinions.

This is the last issue of CHECK IT OUT for this semester. Three issues will be published during the Spring Semester beginning in January 2004. If you have any ideas or suggestions as to ways we can improve, contact Becky Hutto at rmhutto@samford.edu. We look forward to the Spring Semester and new issues of the newsletter!