To research law and find what you are looking for is not easy. Any one platform may not yield the desired results and a thorough search might often have to be made to arrive at the core issues. Most importantly, the omnipresent Man Friday in the form of Google often fails to deliver results as required by legal research.
There are basically two aspects that researchers need to focus on. The first is going into the primary sources of law. This includes regulations, case laws and statutes of a primary authority in a specific jurisdiction. The second is secondary authorities or more particularly sources of supporting information such as legal dictionaries, law reviews, encyclopedias and articles by legal luminaries.
In the modern environment where most research is outsourced, legal services will optimize and pick the right tool that will optimize your task. These include -
• WestlawNext and Lexis Advance – These two sources are generally considered to be the heavyweights as paid research tools for a number of reasons. The first that it helps the cause of researchers through editorially incorporated case summaries and notes. This makes understanding of the intricacies of law a little easier. Next, simple interpretations are also provided of state and federal statutes. Research can be carried on outside the plan opted for. It is possible to go through additional snippets and information that backs up core research for an additional charge. And most importantly, these two carry American Law Reports and offer round the clock technical as well as research support.
It is possible to get access to these sources in a couple of ways. First, is through a sales representative and next is an online purchase. Both will carry one year validity but the online version doesn’t have any advanced plans apart from the basic one. Legal research services often negotiate a discount on rate with the sales person, something that they cannot do for the online versions.
• Fastcase – This legal research tool has a number of interesting features that facilitates the cause of legal research. The crucial one is that it provides a breakup of information about every case simultaneously – number of times the case was referred to, date of decision, number of times the case was searched with the same keywords and relevance score.
• Bloomberg’s Law – The primary focus here is on business law that includes patents and patent assignments. The downside is that it offers a minimum two year contract and does not have head notes or references to statutes.
• Free research tool – The most prominent is of course Google scholar and includes books and writings of authority. The search results are clean with no overlapping advertisements. Others in this category amongst others include State Law Libraries, Uniform Law Commission and Law Review Commons.
Which of these will exactly match requirements depends a lot on the type, extent and depth of research.
