Jenkins Law Library

Jenkins Law Library is philadelphia's public Law Library. Founded in 1802, it is america's first Law Library. Through an experienced, dedicated staff, The Library provides legal research assistance to attorneys and self-represented litigants (srls) via print and online resources. It is also a cost-effective provider of continuing legal education (cle) classes.the Library offers affordable access to legal research tools required to practice Law and assist srls, such as bloomberg Law, lexis, trellis Law, vitallaw, and westlaw. The Library's research platform provides over 250,000 online treatises in addition to its extensive current and historic collection of print volumes available on-site. Keeping with its mission to collect, organize and disseminate legal information, The Library digitizes and indexes materials unavailable online elsewhere, including a comprehensive archive of 112,887 Pennsylvania trial court opinions, 1,108,072 Pennsylvania appellate briefs and records, 2,223 philadelphia city solicitor opinions, 1,374 Pennsylvania legislative histories and 168 Pennsylvania election Law legislative histories.as part of its public function, Jenkins assists srls who arrive daily, seeking access to pa specific forms and information to help them understand their rights in a wide variety of extremely personal and emotionally charged legal problems including employee rights, tenant eviction, protection from abuse orders, debtor/creditor issues, bankruptcy, divorce, and custody issues. Our librarians guide srls to print and online resources. Srls are informed that The librarians are not attorneys and cannot give legal advice. There is no limit to The time we spend with an individual, beyond staff capacity. In 2023, 1005 slrs visited The Library to conduct research and we gave out 760 free form packets. We received 708 questions from srls via email, phone and visits.since april 2019, our librarians have been assisting srls at The first judicial district's family court help center on tuesdays and thursdays for three hours with filing simple divorces. Jenkins' librarians are trained by court staff to assist srls in understanding The divorce process and to help with filling out forms. Srls are informed that The librarians are not attorneys and cannot give legal advice. Complicated issues are referred to The lawyer referral & information services (lris) or legal service organizations. During The covid -19 pandemic, The help center was closed but we continued to help srls via The telephone, email or by appointment in The Library. We returned to The family court help center in august of 2021. In 2023 we helped 919 visitors.family court administrative judge margaret t. murphy thanked The leadership at Jenkins, The members of The staff and The board of Jenkins for assisting srls who appear throughout The family court and in particular at family's court help center. She stated, "your assistance and support has been a tremendous help! Thank you." Family court judge ida chen refers to Jenkins as a "justice partner" with The family court.another public function that Jenkins provides is free membership to philadelphia nonprofit legal service agencies. Jenkins also provides at nominal cost membership and services to philadelphia related and/or budgeted agencies, as well as free membership to all judges in The first judicial district and The Pennsylvania appellate courts.jenkins membership program runs on a rolling calendar year. For 2023, we had approximately 10,063 members which includes judges, students, attorneys and staff at firms of all sizes and within a diverse set of practice areas. Our heaviest attorney users are solo attorneys and small firms who are unable to afford The resources that large Law firms maintain. Most of The Library's onsite visits were from firms with 10 or fewer attorneys. Large firms have significantly reduced The size of their libraries and as such rely on Jenkins for legal resources not available to them via their online subscriptions. In addition, they utilize The research expertise of our librarians on a daily basis.our librarians responded to more than 3,000 requests for assistance in 2023. Jenkins had more than 55,000 unique users visit our website.jenkins' librarians continue to publish blogs to help our users with research. In 2023, 42 blogs were created and they were viewed 4,217 times. The top blog posts were philadelphia family court: domestic relations docket search; new database available: trellis Law; uspto patent public search; new interactive magisterial district court map.the Library has 82 research guides available from its website. Of The 82, thirteen focus on assisting srls. These guides were viewed 36,627 times in 2023. Since covid-19, The Library's services have been in even bigger demand and some of The services or changes we adopted then are still being employed. For example, our classes are still being conducted remotely instead of in person and curbside delivery/return of materials is still available. Although Jenkins has always been strong in customer service satisfaction, The unusual circumstances of The pandemic elicited many accolades which The Library continues to receive.