Legal research is defined as the process of identifying and retrieving data that is required for supporting legal decision-making. Who performs Legal research? Well, it can be performed by lawyers, law librarians, paralegals or anything who wants legal information. This legal data can be collected from printed books, online legal research websites and data portals that can be accessed for free or for a fee from database vendors (LexisNexis / Westlaw).
Legal research generally involves,
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There are many different approaches to doing legal research and there is no hard and fast rule to be followed while doing legal research. However here is a basic guide that may be generally followed by the researcher.
During the initial analysis, one should identify all the facts and details of the people, place, and the acts involved also familiarizing oneself with the connected jargon. A proper understanding of all issues that is to be got via the research has to be made at the outset itself. Also one must identify the different legal theories, procedures and know about the specific relief that is being sought. For this varied secondary sources / resources will have to be referred to, that may contain treatises, law reviews and encyclopedias.
It is important to identify the right legal theories and see if these need to be modified or if new theories have been found that want us to do more research. Most importantly one must recapitulate and see as to what is the core legal theory that is being developed.
Location of original authorities including court opinions/statutes and regulatory law etc may be done using different online and offline secondary sources including varied digests and law publications authoritative paperbacks and study aids. This is again followed by re-evaluation and legal research / updation and must be repeated until one is satisfied. One of the important things while doing legal research is to all the time keep in mind the basic Black letter rules. The black letter law refers to the basic proper elements for a singular field of law, that is generally well known and free from doubt or dispute. Outsourcing of major legal research projects to offshore locations like India can help sacrifice the soaring costs of litigation.
Basic Legal explore method