I can think of at least a few legal research requests over the past month that relied on the power of networking, local knowledge, and deeper dives to get to the needed answer or document. As we all rely increasingly on online resources and digitized documents, it can seem reasonable, but wrong, to think everything is online.

Law librarians can point to, for example, many legislative documents only available in archival storage boxes, the specific years of court records lost in a courthouse fire a century ago, or local, online records that vanished when a website was redesigned. From my own experience in the last few weeks:

• An attorney needed a court order that wasn’t online. The town clerk didn’t have it in the files. A friend of a friend found a copy of it.
• We wanted an older edition of a textbook that isn’t available for purchase. A kind acquaintance scanned and sent a chapter.
• Legislative history showed that a bill of interest was laid on the table but someone remembered that its text was added to another bill that was enacted.
• A colleague knew a trick to get around an idiosyncrasy about a database.
• Someone in a clerk of courts office took time to find an old docket, even with incomplete information.

The examples go on and on. Legal research isn’t just a matter of having access to the best databases; it’s about competency in the full research process, including an inquiring mind; the use of training and documentation; an understanding of the context and available resources; a willingness to make a phone call, call in a favor, or ask follow-up questions; dogged persistence but also the sense to stop when the cost outweighs the benefit; a commitment to teamwork and comfort with not knowing everything; and enough familiarity with local and regional systems and people to know who to ask or why something doesn’t seem quite right. Legal information professionals press into service their knowledge and network every week when encountering complex, quirky information needs.