Best Practical Tips for Legal Research
Legal research is a must skill for lawyers as it helps in solving any case. It helps in finding out the facts of the case and helps in preparing a good argument.
Here are some practical tips that lawyers use when they carry out legal research work.
Tip1#
If you’re using any database website for everything, Google itself make sure that you use the advanced search option, it will not only allow you to type in your keywords but also limit your results. So, databases these days will have special search boxes where you can put in limits for searches as such as a jurisdiction the court or even though the judges name. Google advanced search option: if you’ve never used it, all you need to do is just go to the basic search google box you usually use, type in google advanced and you should find a link to it there. What we’ve done here in the library is we have created a shortcut of that google advanced link on our desktop, and we can use it from there. An example of how we use it is we will use the part where it allows us to limit the domain name; so we will put in something like gov dot UK sites, and this allows our results to show only UK government sites rather than the dot-com sites that you most often see on top in Google results.
Tip2#
Using authorized versions of things: so, when you’re looking at parallel citations for a case you’ll have a number of them if you have something that’s just a court citation, there is an unreported version. Hence, what you really want to do is have a look at whether there’s an authorized version in a law report. If you don’t have that law report at work, that’s where you can contact the library as a member and ask us to help.
Tip3#
When you get a research question from someone and asked to find cases that are relevant to a piece of legislation start searching for it. Look for the piece of information if that legislation is actually there or has been repealed. Hence, the tip there is to make sure that when you’re doing research, you have checked that the piece of legislation you want to use now is whether an act or a regulation is still, in fact, current.
I hope you like the above legal research tips. In case you need help with legal research process or have any queries related to this, get in touch with Cogneesol at +1–646–688–2821 or send an email at info@cogneesol.com
