Speaker 1: 5-Step Legal Research Strategy for the Advanced Legal Research course at Boston College Law School. Legal research is a series of choices. There are many valid ways to find the legal authority you need, but there is only one right place to begin your legal research. All legal research needs to begin in your head. Think about what you are looking for, where it is likely to be, and what methods of research are likely to be the quickest way to find it. I find it helpful to have both a long-term objective and a short-term goal in mind at all times to help me stay on track. And since research is a recursive process, you should find yourself coming back to this step and changing some of your research goals and objectives as your research progresses and you learn more about the topic you are researching. Next you need to make sure you actually understand the problem to be researched. It is not enough to know the facts, you need to understand them. The holding of a case is the application of law to the facts of that case. Don't assume anything. Look things up. When I was in law school, I had a summer job in a government law office. The attorneys couldn't decide whether or not to appeal a case that went against us because they couldn't figure out why we lost. Reading the record, I concluded that the judge had made some assumptions about things that our office had assumed he knew, but he didn't. You need to be a master of the facts, understanding them well enough to educate someone else because you just may have to do that. You also need to understand the legal terms used. Legal terms often have very specific meanings in certain situations. For example, the word substantial means very different things when you are talking about substantial compliance rather than substantial evidence. A good source for this is a legal dictionary, like Black's, which is on Westlaw, or Ballantine's, which is on Lexis. These legal dictionaries don't just give definitions for words, they give citations to cases that define these terms legally. You also need to know enough general legal principles to know what areas of law you will be looking into. For example, you need to know that the parole evidence rule is really more about contracts than evidence. You need to know that jurisdiction usually correlates to geography, but sometimes there are choice of law issues that go beyond that. Part of this you get from law school, but sometimes you'll be researching issues you never studied in law school. In those circumstances, you can start with a very general source, like a legal encyclopedia or a Google search. Once you have clarified what you are researching, you now need to find the relevant binding primary authority that you will read, analyze, and synthesize to reach the legal conclusions you want to communicate to your boss, a court, or your client. Most lawyers begin with secondary sources, which help both with understanding and providing citations to binding authority. But sometimes you will begin with a known statute, regulation, or case, and will visit secondary sources primarily to help with understanding and interpretation. This is a very time-consuming process. You don't want to miss any binding relevant authority. The more you read what you found, the more your understanding will develop, and the better you will be at determining which authorities are useful and which you will want to cite. Everything that is relevant needs to be updated. Law is constantly changing at a snail's pace. Then one day, something different appears. Statutes and regulations get amended. Remember that even with an online code, it takes time for someone to translate legislative enactments or emergency regulations into the subject arrangement of the code. Courts can overrule older decisions or declare statutes unconstitutional or regulations beyond their delegated authority. Be sure to validate every case, statute, or regulation you rely on using a citator such as Shepard's, Keysight, or B-Site. Remember that citators are not a tool to tell you whether or not something is good law. They are a tool to alert you to cases you need to read to determine whether an authority you had hoped to rely on was still good law for that legal issue. Finally, you need to know when you are done. Because legal research is a recursive process, you will keep finding the same thing from different avenues of approach. Once you stop finding something new, don't look for that any longer. On the other hand, don't forget to approach your research tasks from the point of view of the other side. Are there affirmative defenses or limitations of liability that need to be considered? Are there jurisdictional or procedural issues that need to be addressed? I suggest starting to write when you are about three-quarters done with your research. Then you will have a better idea where the holes in your research are and which topics you have already fully researched. This way you won't waste your time researching things you don't need, and it will be easier to know that your research is complete.