Speaker 1: Hey everyone, and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, welcome to the family. My name is Linnea. Thank you for joining us. If you haven't already, make sure you click the subscribe button down below and hit the notification bell so you always know when I upload new videos. So today I'm going to be talking about legal research. So legal research is probably one of the most important skills that you're going to learn in law school. Legal research is what you're going to spend most of your time doing, especially as an articling student and in the first few years as a lawyer. In common law jurisdictions, like most of Canada, legal research is the method that we use to see how cases have been decided before. So when we have a client with a particular issue, we will research that issue and see how the courts have decided those things before. This helps us to prepare our case for our clients and to advise them on their options and likely outcomes. If you go to court, for example, and you haven't done your research, it's possible that you're going to get blindsided by the other side or that you're just going to look like an idiot because you didn't do your research and you don't know what cases apply to your facts and how they apply. So not only do you look dumb, but it also hurts your client. So we don't want that. You have to know how to do legal research properly. And you're going to keep practicing throughout. Even once you become a lawyer, you'll still be practicing and learning techniques. And I'm sure there will be new techniques. So don't fret if you're not perfect at it before you leave law school, but really take the time to learn as much as you can while you're in law school, while nobody's paying you to do it. So hopefully this video can help you to learn some of the basics of legal research. So let's get started. So there are a few different databases that you can use. Most firms subscribe to one database because you have to pay for it to use it. So unless it's a really big firm, maybe they'll have multiples, but chances are they're probably going to use one database. So for example, Lexis Advance QuickLaw is one of the databases that we learn about in law school. And LexisNexis is actually sponsoring this video, which is super awesome. It's my first time collaborating on a video, so that's going to be really cool. And we have a couple of other things coming for you as well. So it's going to be really exciting. So make sure you're subscribed and make sure you're paying attention during this video because at the end of the video, I'm going to have a link to a quiz that you can do based on what I've talked about today. It's super short. Don't worry. It's not like one of your law school exams, but you have a chance to win a hundred dollar prepaid visa card, which is pretty sweet. So take notes. No, I'm just kidding. I will say you do have to be a Canadian resident to win the gift card. I'll have all of the contest details down below if you do want to enter. So make sure you're paying attention. So now let's get into how to actually do research. So whenever you're doing legal research, it's best to start with secondary sources. These are sources like journal articles or books. It's good to start with these because they will tell you more about the topic that you're researching. So for example, in law school or when you're working, you might get tasked with researching a particular topic that you know literally nothing about. So you don't want to start with primary sources because you won't even know where to start. Like what cases are relevant? Where do I go to find this information? You'll have no clue. So you want to start with secondary sources. They will tell you a little bit more about the topic. So you can kind of figure out what area of the topic you want to be focusing on based on what you've been asked to do. And they'll also tell you where you can get some more information. And if you start with primary sources, then you kind of end up narrowing your search too much right off the bat. So you might not get the full scope of everything that you need to really give the lawyer that you're working for or your professor a better idea of the topic itself and how it's going to work for the case that you're working on. So I'm doing a directed research project on elephants in captivity. So on Lexis Advanced QuickLaw, I can look up elephants in captivity. And as you can see, you can narrow your search by jurisdiction or by court, also by content type. So if you just wanted to find secondary sources, then you can narrow it there. But I just want a general search to start with. So if I search, then this is going to give me, so the first, this is giving me the cases, first of all. And then as you can see, you can look at different jurisdictions if you wanted on the side. You can also look at legislation or drafting materials. But I want secondary sources. So I'm going to click on that. And here are some secondary sources related to elephants in captivity. So some of them are going to be relevant. Some of them probably aren't, but there's a lot of different ones here that I can look at, which is really great. And then you can also narrow your search by type searching within your results or looking at content type again, and you can sort them by relevance or whatever you'd like. So I'm just going to look at this first source and so this one here is a secondary source. So if I go to the bottom, here are all the sources that it used, all of its references. So I can go through all of these sources and maybe find some more information about the topic that I'm researching based on the sources that were used to create this article. So you might find cases or other secondary sources. So yeah, using secondary sources is a great way to start your research. So after you have gone through some secondary sources, they'll probably direct you to a few primary sources. So these will be cases or maybe case summaries, which can be helpful or tribunal decisions, depending on what you're looking up because you searched for secondary sources first. Now you have a better idea of what to look for and what cases are going to be relevant for what you're researching. So here is a secondary source that I found based on my research for elephants in captivity. So if I read through a bit of the article right in paragraph three, they cite a case. So now I know that that case might be relevant for what I'm looking for more information about. If I scroll down to the bottom of the case, there will be all of the citations, all of the references that were used. And right there is the citation for the case that I just found. So if I click on it, it takes me right to that case. And now I can look through the case and read it and see if it's actually helpful and if it will be useful in my research. So once you find a case that you think is going to be really helpful in your research, a good thing to do, a good practice is to always note up your cases. So noting up basically means that you're going to look for other cases that have cited this case. So you found one case that's really helpful. You want to know if there's any other cases that are also helpful related to that case. So you're going to note it up and you're going to see if any other cases have cited it for the proposition that you're researching. When you note up a case, you can also find out if it has been overturned by another case. So if, for example, you have a case that's from 2000 and then you note it up and you find that another case has cited that case and overturned it and it's a higher court and all of those things that you learn about, that it's actually been overturned based on the proposition that you are researching it for, then you'll know that you can maybe use that first case that you found, but maybe the law isn't good law anymore and it's actually changed. So it's a great way to kind of get a fulsome idea of what you're researching and to make sure you're getting the law accurate. And it can also just help you find other cases that are related to your topic that might be helpful that you'll want to check into. In Lexis Advanced Quick Law, there's what's called a quick cite function. All you have to do is click on it and it will bring you to kind of a list of all of the cases that have cited the case that you're looking at. So if we go back to this case that I was looking at before, if you see on the side here, there's about this document, and you can look at the history of the case or even commentary that refers to it. But I'm going to look at the citing cases. So here is a little graph that can be helpful to see the treatment that other cases have given this case. And then if you scroll down, here are a list of all of the cases and you can sort them. All of the cases that have cited the case that I was looking at. This here is the treatment symbol. So you always want to make sure you're actually reading the cases and not just following the treatment symbol, but it can be very helpful. And see some of the cases have been mentioned and some of them have actually cited the case. So it really depends. It's not a really great indicator of whether or not the case will be helpful to you, but it can give you a little bit of information, which is useful when you're starting your research. So there's some other really cool features of Lexis Advance QuickLaw that I just wanted to show you guys. I think they could be really helpful when you're doing your research. I know they really helped me a lot. So I'm just going to show you a few of them. If you go here on your case, there's a send to Dropbox function, which is super helpful. I put everything in Dropbox. I always save everything in there. So that one's really great because it just goes directly there. And you can also download the case and you can print it of course, or email it to someone. But this one is probably my favorite, the folders function. So if you click on it, as you can see here, I have different folders. So my directed research and then my major paper. So I saved that case into that folder. So now I can go back to my folders later and I'll see all of the documents, all the cases and secondary materials that I saved. And that allows me to organize all of my files. So if I'm working on multiple assignments, I can have a different folder for each assignment. And that allows me to organize all of the cases and documents into each folder. So it's really easy for me to find things after. I sometimes forget to organize my stuff and then I have to try and remember where I got the information and then go back through my history of searches and try and find which document it was. And so I really love the save to folders function because putting it in the folder, I do it as soon as I realized the case is going to be important or the secondary source is going to be relevant and I'll put it right in there and then I can always find it later. And it's so much easier than going back through your history, but you just have to remember to actually hit the save to folder. But that's a whole nother thing. One final comment I will make is just make sure that you're really practicing your legal research skills when you're in law school. You want to be really good at legal research because it'll help you get a job. And it also will help you when you become a lawyer, you want to be efficient at it because you don't want to be charging your client tons of money because you don't know what you're looking for and you can't figure out how to do it properly. So really take the time to kind of play around with some of the features and then you'll be able to wow everyone when you're done and you'll be really efficient at it. And it doesn't cost you any money when you're in law school to use it. So really take advantage of that. So I think that is everything for today's video. I hope this was helpful for you. I hope you got some good tips on how to do legal research. And I hope that kind of showing you some of the features of Lexis Advanced QuickLaw will really help you to see the kind of things that you can do and some of the functions that are there to help you when you're doing your research so you can become really good at it. If you have any questions or any other tips about Lexis Advanced QuickLaw or about legal research in general, put them in the comments below because I would love to know some other features that I haven't been using or to know some other strategies for really good legal research because I'm still not a pro. I'm still working on it too. So let me know and let everybody else know in the comments if you have some really good tips that'll be really helpful for us. I hope you were paying attention because now's the time for you to go and do the quiz and enter the contest. So all the details are in the description box so check that out and I hope you guys enter the contest and and try and win. Best of luck to all of you and I will see you in my next video. Bye.