Note: Effective September 1st, 2023 research services will be billed at $150 per hour, and billed in 15-minute increments.
Research services policy
Our research services fee is applied only to requests that require the research skills of our professional librarians. Examples include compiling legislative histories, locating documents that are not held in our collection, and complex reference queries that result in a specific work product whether the response is in the form of an email or PDF document.
For example, “Is a decision of one of the four New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division courts considered mandatory authority for the other three, or persuasive authority?”
An appropriate work product via email might be “According to William H. Manz, Gibson’s New York Legal Research Guide, at 183-184 (3d ed. 2004), in the section entitled “Overview of Mandatory Authority in New York”: “The decisions of the various judicial departments are persuasive authority as to each other. For example, a Second Department decision is merely persuasive authority for the Third Department.”
In researching a question, we will notify the member when we have spent 30 minutes on their question but have not yet found the answer. We will explain we need to charge research time for more work, billing at $150/hour, and will ask them whether we should continue. If they authorize the work, we will show all the time we spent on the matter and will only bill for the time past the 30 minute mark.
Research services fees will not be applied to requests of a clerical nature, such as photocopying, or retrieving known items from our physical collection, or from the databases we subscribe to.
