Paralegal

Foundations:

As a paralegal, you can expect to spend a lot of your time researching and summarizing legal issues for busy lawyers, judges and other legal professionals. If you are taking this course as an introduction to the law with the goal of pursuing a law degree, an understanding of legal research and writing is equally essential.  A solid grounding in legal research and writing will help you to make specific and credible recommendations addressing legal problems by researching relevant state and federal law and communicating those findings to others.    

Step 1: What information do you need?

The first step of any research project is determining what you need to know.  In this class, your instructor has given you particular assignments, as well as what you need to include to complete the assignment successfully.   For other legal research, you should have the same starting place.  What does your client need to know?  What did the lawyer you are assisting ask you to locate?  

Three specific questions can help:   

• What are the facts? 
• What is the legal problem?

and 

• Who has the responsibility and authority to make decisions or create laws and/or policy about the legal issue? 

Step 2: Where can I find the information?

Once you've determined what information you need, it's time to think about where you can find it.  A great deal of information is created and stored digitally and in many instances, this has increased our ability to access it.  In the case of legal information, this is partially true.  When a law has been passed in the United States, that law is public record.  With few exception,this means that it's available to the general public on a city, state or federal website.    When conducting legal research, it's important to remember that the currency of your information can greatly impact the end result of the legal action being considered.  

Step 3: How do I access the information?

In legal research, the two main types of sources are often located in different places.  For more information, and practice, in determining the type of source you need, please see the primary and secondary legal sources section of this guide.

Constructing your search

• Pick out the most important words in your question.

• Spell out abbreviations.  Enclose them in quotation marks to tell the database to search for all three words together. 

• Use advanced search

  • Nearly all databases offer this option; you may have to look in various menus.

Step-by-step instructions for searching OneFile LegalTrac

Step-by-step instructions for searching the Government Publishing Office (GPO)

Step-by-step instructions for searching The Making of Modern Law

AI Usage Disclosure: This content was written and edited by a human with assistance from AI tools. For more information on the extent and nature of AI usage, please contact the author liza.boman@slcc.edu

Below are some other resources if you'd like to continue practicing the steps of the legal research process.