I fielded this question for a subscriber last night.

“I need all available Arizona cases where a school district has been held liable for the wrongful actions and assaults of a ‘bully student’ who injured another innocent student. In an important fact my case is that the bully’s parents work at the charter school and not surprisingly, the bully was never disciplined, suspended, etc.  Thus, school district should be held vicariously liable for bully’s actions and for bully never being disciplined.”

We know from the question that the binding jurisdiction is Arizona. It’s a state civil action. This search is driven by Concept, not Code. So, unfortunately, at the outset of the search we know we are limited to keywords.

I like the words: bully, vicarious, school. I can tell from the question where my subscriber has gone wrong. He searched on the phrase “bully student” found nothing and submitted his request for assistance.

For three reasons, I know before I even begin that I’m not going to find what he wants in Arizona: (1) Arizona state courts generate fewer than 2,000 citable opinions annually, (2) bullying is trending in litigation since Phoebe Prince and (3) this is the sort of thing that settles 99% of the time. As a general rule, you can’t have a citable opinion without an appellant.

My subscriber committed the sin of over-searching when he entered “bully student.” All I have to do to help the guy is activate the Arizona State Database only and search on bully. My results indicate that Arizona has less than five judicial opinions containing the term bully and they are all criminal cases.

In a click I Go National, searching on: bully and school and vicarious and receive 14 hits.

This is a start: fourteen citable opinions that contain at least on instance of each of our three terms somewhere in the opinion.

I email the query to my subscriber. I say: “If you agree with me that any opinion with the potential to resolve you search to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ must contain at least one reference to each of the three terms in our query, then we’ve covered the landscape for now.”

Resolving this question – for now – took less than thirty seconds. I can tell that my subscriber is going to be in the analogy business in this litigation. He’s going to have to research instances in which governmental instrumentalities are held vicariously liable for bodily injury inflicted upon an individual in their custody by another individual in their custody. I’m thinking prison cases – where a habitual bully inmate repeatedly attacks model prisoners and prison officials are guilty of willful blindness, reckless disregard – that sort of thing.

One of the most common mistakes people make when constructing a query is looking for too much too soon. The goal of legal research is not to find opinions that support your argument. The goal is to resolve your search to “yes” or “no.” The cases say what they say. The goal of every search is to avoid missing relevant law.

This search, for now, is resolved to “no” as to the binding jurisdiction and “yes” as to non-binding jurisdictions, including one opinion from a bordering state. California holds no more sway over an Arizona court than Maine. But, judges are human, California co-exists with Arizona under the same Ninth Circuit umbrella and the emotional connection to time and place can itself be persuasive.

In my home state of Vermont, which basically has far less citable law, practitioners are constantly looking next door to New York and Massachusetts for persuasive precedent.

The main reason I started TheLaw.net on January 1, 1999, was to ensure that every attorney had searchable access to all 315 Federal and state jurisdictions. Before TheLaw.net, my subscriber would have been limited to his Arizona Slice of West or Lexis. TheLaw.net changed that, redefining the entrepreneurial online law office. As a result, my subscriber has ready access to 14 opinions that may help or hurt, with no upsell, no distracting advertising and no monetized hyperlinks.

He may not cite them in his brief or memo. But, they may well influence the deposition of school officials and oral argument at a motion hearing or otherwise.

That’s up to him. For now, I’ve done my job and he’s on his way.