First Year Legal Research - 2024-2025

• Legal forms provide standardized text for common court filings and transactions and guidance on how to “fill-in-the-blank” with details particular to your matter. Common litigation forms include complaints, answers, motions, affidavits, discovery requests, memoranda, and captions.
• When using forms created for commercial publications, always consult court rules in your jurisdiction to ensure that formatting complies with local requirements.
• Many law offices maintain a repository of common forms or sample filings—check with your institution’s library.

A variety of secondary sources are available to assist the litigator, including

• practice manuals,
• practice notes,
• bar journals,
• treatises,
• current awareness resources,
• continuing legal education (CLE) course material,

and more.  Some of these publications are topic or jurisdiction specific.  Commercial research tools also provide platforms for researching people (expert witnesses, opposing counsel, judges, etc.) and business entities (potential clients, opposing parties, see below).

• Jury instructions set forth the elements of a cause of action in your jurisdiction.  As such, they can be useful research resources even if you do not anticipate your matter going to trial. 
• Numerous publications contain jury instructions, which are characterized as “pattern” or “model” instructions. These publications cover either a jurisdiction, a specific court (typical for federal courts), or a subject matter.

In recent years, many legal technology vendors have adopted technologies that analyze data regarding litigation outcomes and use artificial intelligence to analyze text in judicial opinions and court filings.  Examples include standalone products such as CaseText, which analyzes text in uploaded briefs and compares it to text in a database of judicial opinions, and products embedded in other platforms such as Lexis Context, and Litigation Analytics in Westlaw and in Bloomberg.  These tools likely will evolve in the coming years, and you may wish to supplement your existing research with them.  Know, however, that this technology remains in its infancy and the data available to vendors is often quite incomplete, so proceed with caution!