The processes of performing legal research will vary according to the country and the legal system involved. However, legal research generally involves tasks such as: - Finding primary sources of law, or primary sources, in a given jurisdiction (cases, statutes, regulations, etc.);
- Searching secondary sources (law reviews, legal dictionaries, legal treatises, and legal encyclopedias such as American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum), for background information about a legal topic; and
- Searching non-legal sources for investigative or supporting information.
The first step of starting legal research is, analyzing the fact pattern or the background of the matter provided by the client and separate out all the legally relevant facts. It is helpful to write these facts down separately to understand the co relations between the issues and to identify the primary search terms. While looking at the relevant fact list a classification may require, whether the legal issue is falling under Federal or State Jurisdiction or the issue as a criminal or civil matter. After finalizing the relevant facts the most important step is to create an initial list of legal research terms. Sometime it’s important to be flexible and add synonyms and antonyms for the legal research terms to the initial list. The second important step is to use the legal research terms in searching by using selected databases like Westlaw, Lexis or other online databases. While using these databases for legal research, doing a full text search can be an ineffective use of time and client’s money, especially when the researching area is unfamiliar. It is important to ensure the relevancy of the list of search terms so that those cover the legal subject matter while searching for secondary sources. There can be multiple queries to be run on the databases to extract the most comprehensive information. Researchers often face trouble in identifying the end point of the research. However, in truth, the legal research will not end until the researcher has handed the document in. While writing the memo or brief he may discover gaps in his research that can only be filled with some additional research. While doing research for The United States laws, the researcher must diversify the Federal and State laws along with the various jurisdictions of the courts. Identifying the jurisdiction is a critical step that should be taken prior to beginning research on a federal question. The nation is divided into eleven federal judicial circuits, each including several states. Each state has at least one federal district (trial level) court. If the problem involves a federal issue set in a particular state, identifying the circuit covering the state is a crucial first step. Many issues before federal courts deal with application and interpretation of federal legislation. Often a circuit split can occur, meaning the circuits diverge in matters of their interpretation. Circuits frequently look to each other’s opinions as persuasive authority and often consensus will emerge; if not, the U.S. Supreme Court may grant certiorari to resolve a split in the circuits. Federal courts may hear cases on state law issues under diversity jurisdiction. In such cases, the federal courts look to opinions of the highest court of the state as mandatory authority. For federal topics, a number of secondary sources may be consulted. Law review articles are frequently helpful for background research of current issues in the law, and can be found by searching the full text of a periodical database, or by using a periodical index. Lexis and Westlaw provide databases that include legal periodicals and some treatises. Sometime A.L.R. proved to be good database to begin research on a federal topic for which a statute has not yet been identified because it incorporates statutory law into the annotations than does the state version. There are three versions of the federal code that the researcher may consult.
United States Code (U.S.C.), United States Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.) and United States Code Service (U.S.C.S.) All three versions contain, in addition to the text of the statutes, historical legislative information allowing the researcher to trace the evolution of the section through any amendments back to its original enactment. Once the research is complete, next task is to isolate the most relevant articles, cases, statutes, and key numbers that were found by different methods of research and which cross reference one another. The final step is to write a persuasive memorandum or brief that can be either IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, and Conclusion) form or any other easy to use format as per client’s requirement. About The Author: Effectual Services is a Patent Research Outsourcing company that helps its clients draft and file both provisional and non-provisional patent applications. We also provide other Intellectual Property Services such as, patentability search, prior art search, freedom-to-operate search, invalidity search and Patent Infringement.
Related Articles -
Patent Support Services, Legal Services, Litigation Support Services,
|
