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Legal Research Services
What is Legal Research?
• Process of identifying and retrieving information that is necessary during processing of legal verdict.
• It involves analysis of the facts and the issue
• It helps in determining whether a issue is “case of first impression”
Legal Research process vary according to the country as every country has its own legal system.
Categories of Legal Research
Legal Research involves two categories namely,
Primary Authority: Finding the primary source of law that are binding with courts, governments, individuals. It is in the form of a document. Primary Authority may include rules of evidence, basic law, court opinions etc.
Secondary Authority: searching background information of a legal topic. Articles and papers published by the government or other private sectors would act as a reference in explaining about law. These would include legal articles, legal textbooks, legal brief and memoranda, summarization of laws, blog writing, Multi-jurisdiction researches and many more.
Non – Legal Sources: searching over non legal sources to support the information.
Third-Party Legal Research Providers
Online legal research can be done with the help of third party legal research service providers for attorneys and law firms. Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw are leading service providers.
Lexis – Nexis: provides crucial information for legal, government and businesses. They provide access to search through billions of documents and records across the globe. It is a database for legal and records related information.
Westlaw: A Thomson Reuters product, provides online research service for legal related information to business and legal professionals.
Other service providers:
Google Scholar: Meta search engine, a Google product, allows access to various scholarly literature including documents, journals, citations and records.
Fastcase: Allows online access to state and federal law, statutes. It is tied up with HeinOnline who deliver content to Fastcase search. The company maintains “public library of law” providing access to cases, regulations, court rules and constitution. Fastcase has acquired Loislaw, which was also legal research service provider.
Findlaw: contains resources for legal professionals. It provides search about cases, contracts, materials.
Justia: provides vital information about case law, codes, regulations, legal information for business and legal professionals. Allows legal research to browse through practice areas, states wise.
Importance of Legal Research
Legal Research is essential for attorneys regardless of the practice areas as this is important for “case of first impression”. It helps in legal decision making of the case.
Issue identification: issues may be missed together with other information or some issues may not be identified correctly. In these cases, effective issues identification is must.
Changing law: law will be changing constantly. Also each state and country will have their own law. To be up to date with the changing law, every law should be researched based on the issue.
Conflicting decisions: research the law of jurisdiction to apply analysis to the legal case or create arguments based on the information collected.
With the increased complexity in the legal research, online research should be carried out to develop new skill sets. There has been increase in the volume of the case law and statutory materials and also secondary sources have been increased greatly.
Effective and efficient research is required to conduct legal research. Modern Research strategy should be implemented.
Legal Research at Datascribe LPO
•Providing legal services for firms is a great challenge with large documentation and research work involved.
•Our Research and Drafting services involve subjectively or objectively analyzing legal cases, and presenting the memoranda in a standard format.
•Case Summary services on all possible legal cases which greatly useful benefit our clients and enable them to build strong arguments.
•We provide legal research services litigation and non litigation needs of law firms and corporation.
•We provide subjective and objective/strategic researches.
Contact Us:
Corporate Office, USA
Datascribe Technologies Inc. 7025, South Creek Road, Charlotte, NC - 28277, USA
704-248-6297 705-755-5888 Extn 601
704-248-6197
