In the weeks and months to come I will be writing a lot about the difference between Reference and Research.

IBM’s General Counsel, Robert Weber, explains that while the technology behind Watson, the Jeopardy-playing supercomputer named for IBM’s first CEO, “could become a real boon to the legal profession” it “won’t ever be able to replace lawyers.”

Reference Tasks are teachable. In minutes, most high school students can be trained to retrieve a known Federal or state statute, judicial or administrative rule, form, or opinion. That’s what makes such tasks perfect for robots like Watson.

If you use GPS, you already know what it’s like to have a digital associate. Speak or enter your destination and follow the arrow. Even alternative routes are fully quantifiable.

In the practice of law, you know you’re performing a Reference Task when the objective is to retrieve a known item of information. As Weber explains, such tasks are ripe for robots.

A Research Task is the opposite of a Reference Task, because the needed item(s) of information are unknown to you.

You know the code for the murder statute and you pop it up. It’s as simple as retrieving something from the fridge.

But, you don’t know:

• how many judicial opinions in your state, if any, expressly cite your statute
• how many judicial opinions, if any, cite your statute for the individualized reason you care about
• which of these opinions, if any, are the most/least cited in relation to each other and why
• which of these opinions is the seminal case and which is the last word
• which of these opinions, if any, mirror or trace your fact pattern
• how the opinion(s) you are most interested in have been interpreted since the date of publication and why
• how the opinion(s) you are most interested in have been treated in non-binding jurisdictions and why

The retrieval of a known item of information is resolvable only to “yes,” whereas the search for unknown items of information are resolvable to yes/no/maybe.

For the 21st century legal researcher, this is not some fine point. Reuter’s recently released WestlawNext which relies, in part, on so-called “crowd sourcing.”

In the days of books, West Publishing built its brand on the back of employees who created various case finders that, on their best day functioned as a partial index of opinions.

It is only with the advent of compusearching that we now realize what we were missing. Don’t take my word for it. If you have access to a national plan, take your favorite oft-cited Federal statute, enter: [title number] /5 [section number]  - 18 /5 1346 for example – and make a note of how many hits you receive. Then pop up the annotations to the same statute and count them. Based on my experience, you will see a variance between the actual number of opinions that cite your statute and the number of referencing headnotes/annotations.

You should also find that many judicial opinions that give rise to the headnotes that link you to a particular key number or annotated statute are not included in the resulting index.

(Due to software licensing restrictions, you need to run these tests on your own.)

As a young litigator, if my search was driven by a statute, I grabbed one of those little brown books and turned to the page that listed the opinions citing my statute. It didn’t get any better than that. I knew that I’d found everything that was findable. I didn’t know what I was missing and neither did the judge or opposing counsel.

Today, I don’t have to wonder. I enter the code for the statute or I enter the citation for a case in quotation marks and miss nothing.

The reason crowd sourcing has no place in legal research is that it skews otherwise pure results. I have no interest in results that have been skewed by inferior researchers. I have no interest in search engines that distract me with advertising; whether it’s a banner ad or a series of monetized links to documents my infomediary wants to sell me. I am not alone in this concern:

“Have come across some very odd results with the West relevancy ranking. The most critical documents are often way down the list.  Associates should not rely on it blindly.” ~Summary of Law Librarian Opinions As To WestlawNext

In 2011, there is no need to rely on happenstance. Legal Research Tasks can be as process-driven and precise as Reference Tasks. You just need the right tool.