Legal Research

Legal Research with Westlaw and Lexis

Both Westlaw and Lexis are excellent resources for doing legal research and writing. That being said, you will not have to do much legal research and writing in law school to get excellent grades. If you make school Bar Review you will have to do Legal Research and Writing for real but otherwise unless you really don’t understand some aspect of the law both Westlaw and Lexis Nexis will not help to get you great grades in law school unless you follow our advice below.

All law schools require you to do Legal Research and Writing in order to graduate. Both Westlaw and Lexis Nexis and learning how to use them make Legal Research and Writing extremely easy. With the aid of a computer it is not hard to learn how to search and how to cite cases and write a case brief. The hardest part about the Legal Research and Writing class is that you will have to make a case brief about something you could care less about. This author had serious problems with Legal Research and Writing but only because the topic was terminally boring, not real and of no interest to anyone other than the professor grading the papers.

Case brief with Lexis and Westlaw

But even more important for Law School will be the use of Westlaw and Lexis to look up all the cases in the casebook. Almost all the cases in every casebook are edited versions of the cases. This is extremely bad in that once a principle of law is introduced to you, you will for the most part never see that case used or that principle used again. This is extremely bad. We are all for doing a case brief for all the cases in the casebook but not necessarily the version of the cases portrayed in the casebook. If you follow our advice on this issue you will not only learn the law but it will be easier because after you read about the same issue 10-20 times you will absolutely know what it stands for and how to apply the law for that case.

To accomplish this goal efficiently you need to have a number of friends help you to save time and effort. You will have to look up all the cases from your casebook on Westlaw and Lexis Nexis. But if you have say 3 other friends who will each take a casebook, then you will only have to look up the cases for maybe just one of your classes.

Take your casebook and simply get the portrayed cases in the book and go online to Lexis or Westlaw and look up each case and copy it into a word or text file. Instead of reading the case from the casebook read and do a case brief from the file you copied down. You will be amazed at what has been left out of the casebook version of the case and you will be amazed how much easier it is to learn the law by constant review of the law from prior cases. If you are with a group of students just simply make copies of your case files you have looked up with the other students and for about 2-3 hours of work you will find that you will have a superior method for learning the law. Each of you will have the full text versions of the cases on your laptops and you just made some friends. You will also find that learning the law is a whole lot easier with constant case reviews and applications.

You must do a case brief for the entire case

Remember, the professors who write the casebooks heavily edit the cases to make them appear harder than they are. Reading or skimming the full text of the cases you get from Westlaw or Lexis will actually make you a better law student and give you a constant review your other class mates will not get. You will see and review issues that you need to know over and over again and you will see dissents that many professors leave out of the casebooks.

Just a simple point to drive home particularly with what we call cross over issues. All cases are a virtual review of civil procedure as many appeals have civil procedure issues in them. If you are taking a contracts course they will be edited out. Also when you are reading a casebook case it will edit out the material that has already been gone over in class from other cases. If you follow this advice you will spend more time reading and doing a case brief but you will also spend virtually all your time reviewing for the final exams. You will read about issues not just once or twice but 20-30 or more times. How easy will it be to memorize something you have read about 30 or more times?

Westlaw or Lexis will be a valuable aid to you in your getting a better understanding of the law, and doing a better case brief. For more details click here Law Outlines