Practical Legal Research Report Example

[Nancy Benigar]

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Alternatively, lawyers may need legal research to provide clients with accurate legal guidance. In the case of law students, they often use legal research to complete memos and briefs for class. But these are just a few situations in which legal research is necessary.

1. Identifying the legal issue is not so straightforward. Legal research involves interpreting many legal precedents and theories to justify your questions. Finding the right issue takes time and patience.

2. There's too much to research. Attorneys now face a great deal of case law and statutory material. The sheer volume forces the researcher to be efficient by following a methodology based on a solid foundation of legal knowledge and principles.

3. The law is a fluid doctrine. It changes with time, and staying updated with the latest legal codes, precedents, and statutes means the most resourceful lawyer needs to assess the relevance and importance of new decisions.

You will never know what to research if you don't know what your legal issue is. Does your client need help collecting money from an insurance company following a car accident involving a negligent driver? How about a criminal case involving excluding evidence found during an alleged illegal stop?

Don't cast your net too wide regarding legal research; you should focus on the relevant jurisdiction. For example, does your case deal with federal or state law? If it is state law, which state? You may find a case in California state court that is precisely on point, but it won't be beneficial if your legal project involves New York law.

When it comes to online research, some people start with free legal research options, including search engines like Google or Bing. But to ensure your legal research is comprehensive, you will want to use an online research service designed specifically for the law, such as Westlaw. Not only do online solutions like Westlaw have all the legal sources you need, but they also include artificial intelligence research features that help make quick work of your research

Now that you have gathered the facts and know your legal issue, the next step is knowing what to look for. After all, you will need the law to support your legal argument, whether providing guidance to a client or writing an internal memo, brief, or some other legal document.

Why? Because secondary sources provide a thorough overview of legal topics, meaning you don't have to start your research from scratch. After secondary sources, you can move on to primary sources of law.

Once you find a helpful case, you can use it to find others. For example, in Westlaw, most cases contain headnotes that summarize each of the case's important legal issues. These headnotes are also assigned a Key Number based on the topic associated with that legal issue. So, once you find a good case, you can use the headnotes and Key Numbers within it to quickly find more relevant case law.

Keep in mind, though, that legal research isn't always a linear process. You may start out going from source to source as outlined above and then find yourself needing to go back to secondary sources once you have a better grasp of the legal issue. In other instances, you may even find the answer you are looking for in a source not listed above, like a sample brief filed with the court by another attorney. Ultimately, you need to go where the information takes you.

The simplest way to find out if something is still good law is to use a legal tool known as a citator, which will show you subsequent cases that have cited your source as well as any negative history, including if it has been overruled, reversed, questioned, or merely differentiated.

You have now moved from academic legal research to practical legal research, moving away from analysing and critiquing the law, to practical application of the law in order to help your clients. As a legal professional your job is to advise your client as to what the law is, and what the implications of specific courses of action may be; to give them alternative courses of action, and to give them the best understanding as to how their case is likely to be received by the court. The main objective of your research as a legal professional is to find facts that will back up your arguments, which you then can present in papers and in court, in order to persuade the judge of your legal argument.

You don't want to anger your judge, so presenting them with incorrect or irrelevant authorities is a bad idea; your credibility will be enhanced by producing good quality skeleton arguments relying on the best, most relevant authorities.

Your legal reasoning is also very important. Your arguments should be well thought through and supported by appropriate authorities. For example, you will need to conduct research in order to find an applicable legal rule that you have identified from an authoritative source, such as a major practitioner text, cases or legislation. You then need to apply the rule to your case and draw conclusions. In order to attack your opposition's case you will also need to research how you can dispute the validity of their arguments.

You will often have to identify a rule from multiple sources such as a statutory provision and cases that have interpreted it. Alternatively you can draw analogies from a previous case. All of these ways of forming your argument rely heavily on legal research.

There are many methodologies to conduct practical legal research, but they all have similar things in common. Your 'Opinion Writing and Case Preparation' manual outlines seven steps to legal research.

You must identify the primary source(s) of law here. It is good practice to include details of the relevant ratio of a case (see 5.1 and figure 7.5) and/or the text of the relevant parts of the legislative provision. Do not simply copy out chunks of legislation or judgment though: cite only that which is relevant. Occasionally it may be helpful to attach extracts of the primary source, but again only attach relevant extracts. In general, however, be cautious about attaching extracts. Practitioners, with some displeasure, recount tales of junior lawyers having been asked to undertake research and presenting their supervisor with a sheaf of photocopied extracts from primary and secondary sources. Legal research is not limited to finding sources of law: it is about identifying which sources of law are relevant for the purpose of a specific task. If you have been asked to report the results of your research, expected that it should feature not only knowledge and refer to sources but also analysis and application of the law (with regard to structure and communication). These words will be familiar to you from undergraduate assessment criteria, and they remain important in practice.

Here you should provide enough detail about how you conducted your research and found the relevant law, so that your supervisor or lecturer (i) could easily replicate your research in your absence, and (ii) is reassured that you have followed a sensible research strategy. If your supervisor has given you the sources of law and assured you they are up to date, then you would simply note this (the Figure 8.1 strategy would still be useful here, in helping you decide which source to read first, using the funnel technique). Otherwise, you should be prepared to give a brief description of how to find your sources again quickly. For example, include the search terms you used (if the search produces quick results), the electronic database, or the path or URL that your supervisor can use to browse straight to the relevant material.

It can be useful to reassure your supervisor by stating that you have checked that secondary sources are consistent with your conclusion, and identify those sources. However, if you started your research by using a very basic source such as a legal dictionary, and this adds nothing now that you have progressed on to more reliable legal sources, then there is no merit in including a reference to this source. In other words, recognise that there may be some sources which helped you make a start, but would not now help your supervisor because they add nothing to your report. This applies equally to internet search engines. You may well have started your research with a Google search, but once this led you into decent secondary and primary sources of law, they are what you should cite, and you should not be mentioning Google anywhere in this report, because your supervisor cannot put it to any use at all in advising a client or making a case in front of a judge.

One of the most important parts of your research trail is where you show you have checked that your research is up to date. You will need to explain how you made sure that you have used sources of law which are current and in force (see 8.1.7). Give the date to which the research is up to date (which may be the date of your report).

As electronic databases are kept up to date by the suppliers and usually updated daily, they tend not to provide the specific date on which they were last updated. If you have used an electronic database, then explain which one you used and the steps you took to make sure that there are no further relevant points of law. Refer to the symbols and text formatting of electronic databases to evidence that you have checked the law is up to date. You should also detail here whether any changes to the law are imminent, if relevant.

In practice this would be required to be recorded to assist time management and be used in calculating the overall cost of the matter for the client (see Chapters 6 and 20). Your supervisor should be encouraging you to state the actual time you took; remember that as a trainee (at, say 75ph) you can spend much longer on this (in this example, over three and a half times longer) than a more senior fee earner with a higher charge-out rate (at, say 275ph), and still deliver more profit.

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