Making the law accessible to non-lawyers: effects of different kinds of expertise on perceived usability of online legal information services

Abstract

To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment – for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project – we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.

Keywords:

• legal information
• expertise
• information retrieval
• public sector information
• perceived usability
• relevance
• planning law
• online legal databases

Acknowledgements

The Add-Wijzer was funded under the European Union eContent programme, as one of a number of projects on the reuse of public sector information. The consortium included an owner and producer of public sector information, the Province of South Holland, a web and e-government development company (Framfab (NL), a private sector online legal information provider (Context Ltd), and two universities – Queen's University Belfast and the University of Stockholm (KTH).

Notes

¹eContent was a Multiannual Community programme to stimulate the development and use of European digital content on the global networks and to promote linguistic diversity in the Information Society 2001 – 2005. Details of its successor programme can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm

²Commercial services such as Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw and Justis. BAILII is a free service.

³HMSO now operates within the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI). OPSI has been merged into the National Archives. The HMSO pages on statute law are now located at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/legislation/

⁴Now at http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/index.html under the interface tested, and with a new interface at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm

⁵The key to the other databases is in Table 2.

⁶There was not enough data to test the relationship between the database used and the difficulties reported. On adding in the database as a factor, the ANOVA failed Levine's test. To test all the relationships would require a full factorial design, testing all combinations. That was not possible in the time available during this content and software development project.

⁷Five lawyers and five non-lawyers could not find the amendments using HMSO when completing tasks on national legislation.