All legal research starts with the black letter law and half of all case law research is driven by statute.
Here’s a portable search tip created in the support office of TheLaw.net Corporation. When your search is driven by statute, before you begin, print the statute and place the hard copy next to your keyboard.
I am continually stunned by lawyers and paralegals who commit the sin of word-guessing.
The web is atwitter with the news that WestlawNext now assists enables word-guessing. Enter “sexual battery” and it may ask: “Did you mean “sexual assault?” Perhaps one day it will ask: “Did you mean Mike Tyson?” Who knows? And, that’s the point.
Book research yielded pure results. People aren’t so sure about compusearching.
Humans word-guess. Robots crowdsource. And, that’s fine if you’re searching for Snowball The Dancing Cockatoo. It’s not fine when you’re client is facing several years in prison.
If your client is accused of aggravated assault and you guess “sexual battery” when the statute says “sexual assault”, you either didn’t read the statute or you’re working from a faulty memory. You need a simple, reliable process.
This is an example of when old technology – simply printing the statute and having it at your fingertips for reference - is the only solution that guarantees you will not miss relevant law. It guarantees your query is rooted in the plain language of the law, ensuring you retrieve all relevant law.
At the outset you need to know the size of the dataset you’re working with. How many opinions mention your statute? Usually there aren’t that many. Many statutes have never been cited. Even fewer have been cited by the court you care about for the reason you care about.
When searching by statute, first search using only the statute number. If your client is accused of committing a murder in Florida he/she is charged under 782.04. That’s your Anchor. Enter that first. You don’t search on murder because that leads to diffuse results, returning, for starters, both criminal and civil cases.
If you find too many opinions, filter by concept:
782.04 and carjacking
782.04 and “aggravated child abuse”
782.04 and “home-invasion robbery”
I didn’t invent the phrase home-invasion robbery, I cribbed it directly from the statute. I consistently query in the precise language of the controlling law to ensure I never miss relevant law. I want to see every opinion that expressly mentions my statute number, together with the general relevant circumstances. That’s my Hotlist.
Why rely on woefully incomplete annotations that were compiled when all we had were books or the happenstance of crowdsourcing?
When your search is driven by a statute or regulation, all you need is this simple process to find all relevant law, every time, guaranteed.
