Legal Research and Writing in Practice
About This Course
Legal research in a practice setting require a keen understanding of the needs of the client and of the case. It requires strategic analysis of what is important and what is not, and the ability to pare issues down to only the most relevant and most pressing, the ones that will win or lose the case. The ability to quickly and comprehensively use legal research tools is key. Similarly, legal writing in practice is very different from what is taught in law schools. New lawyers often experience culture-shock, when their meticulously researched and thoroughly comprehensive pieces of written work are returned, slashed with red ink, by their partners. The demands of fast-paced legal practice require writers to be succinct, to-the-point, and ruthlessly relevant.
In the first half of the programme, participants will learn how to apply a structured approach to legal research, that will help them to research faster, more comprehensively, and more usefully. Learners will learn how to use modern legal research tools and methods and be brought up to date on the latest legal technology issues, involving the use of generative Artificial Intelligence in legal research. In the second half of the programme, will learn to analyse the needs of various potential readers, legal and non-legal, as well as how to craft practical and useful legal memoranda and communications. Professional writing etiquette will also be covered.
What You'll Learn
• Identify appropriate secondary material as starting points for their research
• Identify relevant databases to conduct their research by jurisdiction
• Use Boolean operators to craft appropriate search strings to search for cases
• Conduct noting up or reference tracing to ensure that the cases they are relying on remain good law
• Appreciate the limitations of relying on Artificial Intelligence Large Language Model (LLM) tools such as Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) when looking for case law
• Explain the objectives of legal writing in practice
• Identify the various stakeholders that a piece of legal writing is intended for
• Draft a simple legal memorandum for a legally-trained and non-legally trained reader
• Explain professional communications etiquette
• Draft a simple e-mail for legal correspondence
Entry Requirements
NA