Whether you are an attorney, a paralegal, or a law student, you will frequently need to conduct legal research. Legal research is a time-consuming and tedious undertaking. Yet, comprehensive legal research can be the difference between winning or losing a case and can lead to more desirable settlement outcomes for your clients. Here are some tips on how to perform this essential legal task more efficiently.
Save Your Sources
There are a wide range of sources available for legal research. Because there is no single source that could cover all the material available, it is judicious to use more than one. Each search resource has its search algorithms to determine the relevant cases, thus a good mix of resources will yield a useful variety of cases for your reference.
Most law firms, faculty, and state law libraries will have a master list of resources to enable an easy research approach. You can save this list and add other resources of your own to it—such as attorney blogs and local court dockets—so that you will have a go-to starting point each time you need to look something up.
This goes without saying, but make sure that you include both primary and secondary sources in your research. Secondary sources are usually the best place to start your research as they provide a working perspective on where your issue stands in the broader context of the law. They are often used to help locate primary sources, and to define legal words or phrases. It can be said that primary sources show historical precedent while secondary sources show current relevance.
These days, most primary and secondary source material is digitalized and stored on online databases. Your state’s Bar Association will likely have its own free research service and Google Scholar is a free option for simple case law research. Of course, ordinary search engines will also bring up relevant data, particularly primary law information, although you may have to sift through a barrage of non-law results.
However, if you are looking for extra assistance, you should consider investing in a legal research tool that will search, compare, and analyze documents quickly and accurately. Legal research tools save you a lot of time as they can bring up a variety of sources with a single search. Some tools even have tracking capabilities to see how any statutes or regulations have altered over time.
Case in Point
When reviewing search results that are relevant to your case, ensure that you choose cases that are both positive and negative towards your position. This way you can have a more well-rounded understanding of where your argument stands against the controlling case law in your jurisdiction. Sometimes, cases with undesirable outcomes can also be used to argue a point of distinction between your client and the other plaintiffs or defendants.
Looking at landmark cases for your specific issue within the relevant jurisdiction is another good way of understanding the full explanation of the law. It will likewise tell you if the law has been altered or withdrawn over time and how this could affect your case. More often than not, landmark cases will link you to other pertinent cases that reflect the current state of the law.
Using helpful cases to find other cases is an important legal research tactic. Premiere legal research tools such as Westlaw have legal research shortcuts like ‘KeyCite’ that can be used to bring up cases that cite the one you are reading. These tools have additional links that mark certain cases as authority cases, allowing you to choose good matches that may hold weight for your case at a glance.
Know Your Limits
It can be difficult to know when you have done sufficient due diligence. Legal research can often become a rabbit hole in which researchers lose valuable hours of their time. Sometimes, you may find all the information you need on a fairly straightforward case within the hour. But occasionally, you will not be able to find the exact statute or law that applies or find way more documents that you can humanly process.
Knowing when to end your search is one of the hardest parts of legal research. If you are using a legal research tool, it is usually safe to say that you can stop when you have reached the items with low relevance scores. If you are manually searching and find that you keep being led back to the same few items, even when using multiple sources, then you have probably exhausted all options.
Major legal research platforms will also often have reference support included in their packages. This is where professional legal researchers can assist you when you hit a wall with your research. Otherwise, you could ask a friendly colleague or mentor to have a look with a fresh set of eyes. An additional perspective may reveal an interesting angle or idea.
Legal research may be a challenging task, but good research holds great sway over case outcomes. By becoming proficient at legal research, attorneys, paralegals, and law students can save time while obtaining important information to support their cases.