IMPORTANCE OF LEGAL RESEARCH
Whether
you’re in your first or last semester of your law degree, everyone is always
telling you that everything is important: you have to have effective public
speaking skills, you have to have excellent writing skills, you have to
network, and you have to have excellent critical analysis skills.
All
of these skills are useful, but having effective legal research skills is
incredibly important to your success, not only in your law degree but also
throughout your legal career. There are far too many cases, statutes and
regulations for us to learn all of them at law school, but legal sleuthing
skills will mean that you’re able to learn about new areas of the law and keep
up to date throughout your career. Having Sherlock Holmes-like skills in legal
research will also ensure that you are not wasting your time sifting through
irrelevant information.
You’ve
probably been given a problem solving assignment or an essay during your law
degree, for which Google didn’t have the answers, and you instead needed to
navigate the labyrinth of legal databases (if you’re just starting your law
degree, this is probably coming!). For the assignment you needed to look up
cases and legislation, and even if you started the assignment the day or the
week before the due date, you realised that good research takes time (and we
all know that law students are time poor). Sorting the relevant cases and
legislation from the irrelevant ones can be time-consuming, but if you’re not
confident in what you’re doing, you’ll lose writing time (and possibly also
marks).
Once
you start your legal career, you will have billable hours and your supervisor
(and your clients) will not be impressed if you have spent hours figuring out
how to actually open the legal database, find the search button and locate the
relevant information instead of actually analysing the cases or legislation
that is relevant to their matter.
You
were probably giving a library lesson in your first semester about legal
databases and how to use them. It probably went straight over your head and you
never revised those notes again, or maybe you spent the session checking
Facebook when you were supposed to be practicing Boolean search queries.
If
you are struggling with your legal research skills, speak to the law librarians
at your university for some excellent tips about how to use legal databases, as
they are pros when it comes to effective and efficient research. Alternatively,
see if your faculty or library offers legal research seminars. While this may
take an hour or two out of your day, it will save you hours of sifting through
irrelevant information and means you’ll actually get to the most important
part, critically analysing the relevant sources and answering the question,
even quicker.
Zia ul Mustafa Ansari
Assistant Professor Law
JEMTEC, School of Law, Greater Noida
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