Information-Seeking Behavior of Law Practitioners: A Survey of Bahawalpur City

This article is an attempt to investigate the information needs and seeking behavior of law practitioners at District Bar Association Session Court Bahawalpur. Purposely, it seeks to ascertain the type of information required by the lawyers to meet their specific information needs; their information seeking habits; different information sources used by them and the impact of ICT on their information seeking behavior. Data were collected with the help of questionnaire and analyzed through SPSS software version 14. It was noted that almost all the lawyers always seek information for case preparation. It was found that they acquire information from their District Bar Library; senior lawyers and personal collection. In case of urgent need of information they use law digest, personal collection and PLJ. They mentioned that English is their preferred language and print material is their preferred format. The results of the study showed that only three respondents admitted that ICT has completely changed their information seeking habits. However, they admittedthe fact that ICT has mad information seeking process easier. Frequency of internet usage by lawyers was gloomy. Only 11 respondents out of 54 reported that they use internet and admitted that their online information retrieval skill is poor. They pointed out the need of computer training and internet service for the lawyer\u27s community. They also demanded that decided cases/judgments and court hearing should be on lined