All seems a bit silly .. and it’s the second time they’ve been moved along, so to speak.
Here’s the report from Law.com
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http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202534308936
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Superior Court of California administrators have told the San Francisco Law Library to move out of the Civic Center courthouse by the end of the month.
The room on the fifth floor has long been a place where lawyers or litigants could look up statutes and use computer terminals with free LexisNexis access. San Francisco Superior Court Executive Officer T. Michael Yuen said the court needs the space for its self-help access centers for pro per litigants.
“We have to find a way to streamline and make a better use of all of our facility space,” Yuen said. The law library is funded from court fees but operated by the county, and the county is responsible for housing it, Yuen said.
San Francisco Law Library Executive Director Marcia Bell acknowledged that litigants, particularly those in family law cases, need convenient access to court forms and staff members who can help them fill them out, which they’ll get with the self-help center. But she pointed out that the reference room’s materials — and public copy machine — are handy, too.
“It’s not a high-volume walk-in situation but it’s the only place in the courthouse that has those services,” she said. The library’s main branch is located on the fourth floor of the Veteran War Memorial Building on Van Ness — a 10-minute trek for lawyers with rolling briefcases.
Law library trustee and employment lawyer Kathleen “Kay” Lucas, of the Lucas Law Firm, said the closure will hurt small firms and solos the most.
“As a small practitioner it was the most complete library that was available to me,” she said. “I don’t have a librarian to call at my firm.”
Yuen said the court needed to make space for a self-help center that’s now two blocks away so it doesn’t lose litigants who would otherwise seek out help.
The San Francisco Law Library’s main branch location is also in limbo, after years of uncertainty following a relocation from City Hall in the 1990s. Bell said the filing fee revenue that funds the law library has fallen 22 percent in recent years. Bell said she isn’t looking at layoffs, but is disappointed that the court didn’t work with the organization to find a different solution to the need for space.
“They’ve got all these dark courtrooms,” she said, referring to the closure of six civil departments due to budget cuts this fall. Yuen said “it’s a myth” that the dark courtrooms go unused, citing criminal trials that are transferred over from the Hall of Justice and the need for space for settlement conferences.
Five years ago the court proposed an alternative use for the reference space, Bell said, and brought in a group from the San Francisco Law Library to examine alternatives. This time, she said, the court called her without warning and served “basically, an eviction notice.”
