Fees & Charges

These are our fees and charges for additional services we provide such as research projects and document delivery. These are add-on fees which are separate from our Membership Rates. You can always ask for a cost estimate. We will always notify before conducting any service (beyond photocopying/scanning) that would involve a fee or charge. Please see the menu below for different types of charges.

All Fees – Expanded

Third Party Service Fee

Effective 9/1/2023, there will be a $25 Administrative fee for our staff, in consultation with our patrons, to initiate inter-library loans and request documents held at other libraries and archives on behalf of Institute members. Member is also charged for any inter-library loan charges, shipping charges, or document retrieval fees charged by the third party. Note that if OCLC is NOT successful, there will be no charge. Research charges will be billed when applicable, as specified in the Research services policy.

New Fast Track Service

The New York Law Institute has reduced the cost of its Fast Track Service option.  For an added fee of $40, the reference librarians at NYLI will expedite your request, placing it at the top of the queue for priority handling, guaranteeing that it will receive the fastest service.

Document Delivery

E-mail/Fax/Photocopy Service

$2.00 per page

Effective September 1st, 2023 there will be a limit of $46 per document if sourced electronically.

We have extensive contacts with other libraries, commercial document delivery services, and specialized research companies. Our staff, in consultation with our patrons, are able to initiate inter-library loans and request documents held at other libraries and archives on behalf of Institute members. Effective 9/1/2023 for such a request, the patron will be billed a $25 Administrative fee/ OCLS fee by NYLI plus any inter-library loan charges, shipping charges, or document retrieval fees charged by the third party.  Note that if OCLC is NOT successful, there will be no charge.

 

Self Service photocopies/pages

$0.35 per page

 

 

*Copyright royalties may be applicable.

Messenger Services Outside New York City

Books and other materials can be sent to offices outside New York City via FedEx overnight service. You will be billed for the shipment cost or you can provide a FexEx account number for us to bill to.

Rush Delivery Messenger Service (within 1 hour)

We can make arrangements to have books delivered to your office by messenger. Please ask for pricing.

Borrowing eBooks

We offer over 230,000 eBooks, through EBL Ebook Library and our OverDrive eBooks Collection, to our members at no charge. You can download them anytime from anywhere and to any device with no waiting lines. Visit our eBooks page for more information.

Lost Book Replacement Cost

Overdue fines can accumulate for 14 business days. Following this period, you will be requested to return the publication to the library. Failure to do will result in a charge for the full replacement cost of the publication plus a processing fee.

Research Services

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.

Document Retrieval/ILL Services

We have extensive contacts with other libraries, commercial document delivery services, and specialized research companies. Our staff, in consultation with our patrons, are able to initiate inter-library loans and request documents held at other libraries and archives on behalf of Institute members. Effective 9/1/2023 for such a request, the patron will be billed a $25 Administrative fee/ OCLS fee by NYLI plus any inter-library loan charges, shipping charges, or document retrieval fees charged by the third party.  Note that if OCLC is NOT successful, there will be no charge.

Research charges will be billed when applicable, as specified in the Research services policy.

*Copyright royalties may be applicable.

Regular Delivery Messenger Service


We can make arrangements to have books delivered to your office by messenger. Please ask for pricing.

Borrowing Physical Books

All books in our collection, with the exception of some selected rare volumes, can be borrowed for 7 business days, with options to renew up to two additional 7-business day periods. Overdue fines are calculated at a rate of $2 per item per day. There is no charge to borrow books from our collection other than delivery charges, if applicable.