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Faculty Assistants
Faculty assistants (FAs) are the the administrative, secretarial staff assigned to the various professors at a law school. It is their responsibility to act as an administrative (and often personal) assistant for the instructor, supporting their scholarship, coursework, communication with students, fielding inquiries, etc.
FA's main goal is to do the work they're assigned effectively and as expediently as possible. Learning a new interface is something they have little interest in, especially if it's complex or difficult to use. They are juggling multiple responsibilities so the simpler a given one is, the better.
FAs only sometimes have familiarity with the law / a law degree of their own, so when they have to make changes to the instructors materials they don't have a developed instinct for what may be a right or wrong sort of change. The system they're making changes on, then, being as simple as possible is key.
Instructors teaching courses is a repeated activity, so the less work an FA has to redo what they had just done a semester ago, the better. With their variety of responsibilities, ideally some of the tasks can be automated or 'one-click.'
Some instructors like to prepare course material packets throughout the semester for their students to pick up at a place like a copy center. Some FAs are thus tasked with merely exporting materials and sending a PDF of them to a copy center, while others are tasked to do a bit more work, for example: exporting a casebook section, creating a PDF of any outside links that are referenced in that section, then inserting them into the the casebook section PDF.
There can be wide variance in tech-savvy among FAs, especially when it comes to adopting new technology. All are experts in the various systems their faculty and institutions require, but learning new technology is an added burden on an otherwise heavy workload. Specific to digital publishing, some FAs are expert in putting together materials using browsers, Acrobat, etc.. Others are less familiar with these systems.