Legal Informatics: Metamorphosing Law Students into Legal Professionals Based on Empirical Evidence of Attorneys’ Information Seeking Behaviors

Law students\u27 practical ability to seek information by researching and to organize the complex layers of legal and non-legal information will not be enhanced without the law school\u27s special efforts to provide pedagogies of practice in their remaining two years. In other words, the lack of more practical pedagogy prevents the law students from changing and extending their cognitive maps until they have a real job, where they do research, draft documents, advocate and counsel, and negotiate. This study attempts to find answers to the questions by investigating the extension and enlargement of young lawyers\u27 cognitive maps and their process to solve a difficult, uncertain situation. I believe that unraveling the mystery of their information seeking will contribute on law librarians\u27 efforts to develop an appropriate curriculum specifically for 2L and 3L students and further, how to design the advanced legal research and upper-level writing classes