Online legal research billing policies.

Why should you care about online billing policies? With all of the work that librarians have to do, why stack up another mound of work on your desk? Why is a policy for online legal research billing important to librarians? Are law firm finances even a part of the librarian's concern? Should we care about the firm's overall accounts and balances?

The answer to these questions is YES, and more so, when it comes to usage costs for online research. Librarians must be actively involved in how much the firm uses, spends, and recovers for all online legal resources.

If you have not been involved in these areas in the past, I strongly urge you to carefully consider getting involved to see how you can help the firm and the library. As librarians, we are always looking for an opportunity to market ourselves. Developing an online legal research billing policy is a great opportunity. With money issues, you can always get people's attention.

As part of my research for overhauling our firm's online legal research billing policy, I posted a note on the law-lib listserv requesting sample online legal research billing policies. I asked for information on policies that detailed appropriate uses, privacy issues, how to bill or not bill for personal use, CLE presentations, and marketing. The responses I received were varied.

I could see that the number of online legal research billing policies will be about the same number of law firms that have online legal research resources. In this article, I describe what I learned from the many variables there are for online research billing policies and how I used the results of my survey to develop our new policy.

What I Learned from Law-lib

While some firms do not bill any online research, others bill all online research. In some policies, there was a distinct difference between flat-rate and pay-as-you-go contracts. Some policies included provisions for situations such as CLE presentations, pro bono work, and personal use. In some policies, only the online services that the firm bills to clients were governed; if a service is not billed at all, then its usage is totally ungoverned. Additional issues that were addressed in the policies included: how much to charge for the research billed; billing some but not all research; personal, CLE, or other non-billable usage; and finally, how (or if) research charges are…