[TheHug]

Pretty new GM, played a couple games so far with a group of players who are mostly pretty new to RPG's (and who are impossible to wrangle into the same room with any regularity to play.)

I'm pretty comfortable with all of the basic mechanics at this point, and get get a game running smoothly. When the action starts, my players seem to be enjoying themselves. What I'm wondering about is before that. We've only had a couple sessions really, and the last one was one where I tried to get them into a little more of the legwork/investigation side of things before they went after the target. I had a couple scenes I wanted to get them through to get them the info on the job and what exactly the situation was. I think it got bogged down a little. It felt like a little TOO much forced dialog and investigation on the part of he hacker and the face, while the other players were just kinda sitting around. I think my players are, for the most part, definitely more of the "let's get started with the sneaking and the hacking and the shooting and infiltrating" variety, which is fine by me, because that's my favorite part of GMing (setting up and designing a hostile environment, mediating their way through it).

Obviously, though, legwork is an interesting and necessary part of the game and adds a bit of good pacing. So I guess I'm wondering how y'all as individual GM's handle those parts, especially for newer players who might take less initiative to do legwork on their own ("oh we know where the target is, let's drive over right now!")

Looking at the Missions, they deal with legwork mostly as simple die rolls, with different levels of information made available. I like the simplicity, but  a lot of it seems like mission-critical information, and if the players roll poorly then they are just screwed-- at which point the GM would have to spoon feed the information and railroad it through, which doesn't seem like too much fun.

[Mantis]

Well, even in Missions, it wasn't all die roll determined. If the players rolled poorly or the contact did, there was always the option of buying the information. If the player rolled bad but the contact knew the info, it was fairly cheap, a few hundred ¥. If the contact didn't know the info they could "ask around" but that could cost thousands of  ¥. It was generally better to move onto a different contact.
That said, we usually role play out a conversation with the contact with the die roll determining just how much info the players can get from that contact. You can use contacts to reveal information the players couldn't find another way, like which guards can be bribed and when the new security system goes on line. Or where the back door matrix access is so they don't need to storm the fortress. If your game is more pink mo-hawk/kill 'em all sort of game, then legwork is much less useful since the players aren't likely to use the subtlety the leg work clues allow.
Generally the players should need to go to contacts to get all that extra info the Johnson didn't tell them, as well as background on the Johnson himself, just to make sure they aren't being set up. Mr. J just tells the characters what he wants them to know, not everything they need to know. In some cases he doesn't know everything himself and in others, it is just a power play thing. Politics and knowledge. That sort of thing.