Harris County Law Library
The Law Library will be closed in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24. The library will close at 5:00 pm on Wednesday, November 22, and will reopen at 8:00 am on Monday, November 27.
The Harris County Law Library wishes you abundance, hope, peace, and a festive holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families!
The Legal Tech Institute at Harris County Law Library has a complete lineup of events planned for the next few months. Please visit our LTI Course Catalog to view the upcoming programs and to register for each course. The following are currently scheduled.
Through its course offerings, the Legal Tech Institute introduces you to trends in law practice technology. LTI helps you become more proficient legal researchers using the tools freely available in the Law Library, including Westlaw and Lexis Advance. Whenever possible, the LTI provides Texas CLE credit for the courses offered, and we bring this all to you free of charge. In addition, we also record the courses and make them available via our website within a few weeks of the live presentation. Those who view the videos can claim CLE credit for up to one year after the courses are presented.
If you have an idea for a legal tech topic that you would like to see presented, please let us know. We welcome suggestions and feedback, and we appreciate your involvement in making the Legal Tech Institute the best that it can be.
Our staff celebrated this week's holiday with a Thanksgiving potluck in our break room/historical statute room. We're posting this photo for anyone who would like to know why our decades-old statute books are so aromatic.
The time we spent together gave us a moment to reflect on all the many things for which we are thankful. As law librarians, we see the positive impact access to legal information can have on individuals' lives each day, so we are always grateful for the partnerships that allow us to make information available to our patrons. We are thankful for the partnership between the Harris County Attorney's Office and the Houston Bar Association. We are grateful for the Houston Volunteer Lawyers to whom we refer many self-represented litigants seeking to connect with a licensed Texas attorney for free, accurate legal information. We are also grateful to work with TexasLawHelp.org to be a point of access for Houstonians who are in need of the legal information posted there. And we are thankful for the great many community resources, from Houston Lawyer Referral Service to TexasLegalAnswers.org to AVDA, we refer our patrons to each day when the best information we can provide is a specialized service to help connect them with a licensed attorney. Finally, we are grateful for the publishers, including Westlaw, Lexis, O'Connor's, the State Bar of Texas, HeinOnline, and many more, who work with us to make their wealth of legal information open and available to all within steps of the courthouse. We are thankful to work with so many to ensure open and equal access to legal information.
When conducting research in an unfamiliar area of the law, one of the best resources for getting started is a pathfinder or resource guide. The Harris County Law Library has a number of helpful guides on a variety of legal topics in the most commonly practiced areas of the law: Family Law, Probate, Real Estate, Labor and Employment, and Civil and Criminal Litigation.
Two additional Research Guides -- Law Practice Management and Attorney Networking Resources -- were created specifically with solo and small firm legal practitioners in mind, and yet another guide, Recursos en Español, was written just for Spanish speakers.
To access all of these Research Guides, please visit our dedicated webpage where links to all ten of the guides are posted. Open each link to view a full-page, printable PDF of every title in the collection. For help locating any of these resources in print or online via our Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline, and O'Connor's legal database subscriptions, please stop by the Reference Desk for assistance from our friendly staff.
Today is Love Your Lawyer Day! Join the millions around the world who will be celebrating their favorite lawyers on Friday, November 3, 2017. To learn more, visit the American Lawyers Public Image Association website.
What’s behind the name? “Ex Libris Juris” is Latin for “from the books of law” and much of the information here will relate to the legal information collected and curated by the Law Library. Additionally, “Ex Libris” has long appeared on bookplates – labels appearing inside the front cover of books – and has acquired the connoted meaning “from the library of” to show ownership of the book. Using this connotation, the phrase becomes “from the library of law” and better describes the posts about digital resources, event announcements, and research tips that will regularly appear here.
