It was a Westlaw download that cost, not the printing.

Westlaw is an online court opinion publication service like Lexus/Nexus, that provides certified accurate, formatted court written opinions, and law review articles, and breaks them down by subject, jurisdiction, holding, subsequent citations, etc. Back then, searching was usually free, but downloading for insertion into briefs or printing costs by jurisdiction and length. Nowadays most firms have a blanket monthly license tailored to their needs [ie, state courts where they do business, federal courts, major law reviews, and periodicals in their practice area], but usually still bill out to clients on the assumption/client agreement that longer cases take longer to review.
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yup.. hated using lexus in para school when i went
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yes it's far fetched. but BB world is nutty. gonna be a good ride. be pretty funny if my guess is right though. :-)
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Spoiler that shit!:-)
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Spoiler what? It is a theory on what he thinks will happen.

It does not spoil anything at all.
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I just found it kind of odd that she said that it would be like $300-$400. They really couldn't just cover those fees themselves? Or is not to be used for personal use at all?
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Point is, it's going to show up on the Westlaw monthly invoice.

I'm trying to remember back to how the software worked back then, but I believe each search prompted you for a 'client/matter' number and a password unique to the attorney doing the search.

There might have even been a field where you could note the nature of the research being done

There were also 'client/matter' codes for general research or continuing education, but you definitely had to specify why you were using those, because it was both an expense the firm ate and evidence of non-billable time spent at work.

So a line on the Westlaw invoice at the end of the month might look like


100.151 - In re Whatever Case it is This Week
Charles McGill
100 pages - Federal Register, vol. xx , pp yy-zz
$276.86

And that would go directly to the office manager for the firm paying the bills for Charles McGill's password.
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She had to get the caselaw from Westlaw - in those days, Westlaw charged you through your account per page printed.

So without his own private Westlaw account (which Jimmy wouldn't have had), he had no way to get simple access to those documents, let alone print them off. This pre-dates the ability to just google search and pull up any case you need.

Now, what doesn't make any sense is that he's in Albuquerque. UNM has a law school there and the law library will have a public access westlaw account he could have used and paid per page.

Moreover, they'll have every Southwest Reporter he could have ever wanted in hard copy - he could've just pulled the cases from the hard copy off the shelf and photocopied them. Those reporter sets come with full shepardizers that will link to other related cases as well. He's not that far out of law school; he'll still remember how to do that manually - especially since the books were still in common use back then.

Nothing about what he did made sense there. It was a bit of a deus ex machina from the writers and a little bit lazy, IMO. Jimmy's not dumb - he knew enough about Chuck's partnership agreement to know that he was walking a thin line there.

He'd have just waited a night, gone to the UNM Law Library and gotten all the cases/statutes he was after without risking getting sideways with HHM.

EDIT: Looks like Baby Lee got to some of that already. Still, he had a far better option available to him.
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That was my main problem with it. You would think that all three of them would have known what issues it would raise.
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Holy crap, I know some of you know way more about this than the rest, but fer cryin' out loud, use some willing suspension of disbelief. It's a TV show.
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I'm not a big fan of suspension of disbelief in a non-fantasy setting, especially when the answers are readily available.

Good example:

Walt is a chemistry wizard, but can't figure out how to synthesize methylamine when it is, literally, a problem in an Organic Chem textbook.

Shit, I can synthesize methylamine.
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It seems pretty clearly set up to be a big plot point, and viewers are already murky on what's going on. So what does a little exposition hurt?
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are/were you a lawyer baby lee?
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i havent seen it for a couple months.. but would synthesizing it degrade the value... i know Walt took pride in the grade of the meth being in the high 90s
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The methylamine was just a precursor needed for the manufacture of methamphetamine.

All methylamine has to be synthesized. Pretty much every organic product you come in contact with on a daily basis is synthesized through an industrial process.

Purity, toxicity, and cost are the biggest issues in organic synthesis.

There are a few different processes I know of (I'm sure there are several others) by which you can produce a primary amine, like methylamine: reductive amination and Gabriel Amine Synthesis.

For someone as supposedly gifted as Walt to be unaware of how to perform reductive amination in a controlled environment (he didn't need to worry about it with Gus, but he did elsewhere) was conflict for the sake of conflict in the plot.
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