Legal research is simply the method through which information is retrieved or identified in order to support legal decision making. You may want to know who performs Legal research.

Legal research is carried out by law librarians, lawyers, paralegals or anyone who is in need of this specific type of information.

This type of information like any other can be gathered from books, free web sites or portal (some have a fee attached such as databases from a few vendors).

These are a few things legal research normally involves;

• Looking for non-legal sources to get supporting information
• Looking for primary authority such as regulations, cases or statues and more.
• Looking for secondary authority on a specific legal topic.

Doing a legal research also have a few if not many different ways one can approach it and as such there is no set rule to be carried out when doing legal research. However like everything there is guide that any legal research can follow that may improve their success rate.

• It is best to begin having a preliminary analysis of information and then start to frame questions from it.
• Consult sources that are not primary ones.
• Ensure to evaluate the content researched
• Make effort to find the primary authority
• Then evaluate the research again
• Update the research
• Complete the research
• Finally follow the Black letter Law rules

When carrying out the preliminary research, one must make the effort to identify every single fact and details of the place, people and acts involved along with familiarizing oneself with related jargon. Having a proper thoughtfulness about the issues that should be gained from the research must be made from the outset itself.

It should also be ensured that the person carrying out the research identifies the different legal theories, know of the relief that is being looked for and procedures. To do this a few resources and or secondary resources will definitely be referred to which is not limited to encyclopedias, treaties and law reviews.

It is ideally important to know the right legal theories and know if anything needs to be changed or reformed and also if new theories have been seen which requires for more research to be done. As a result it is highly important that one reviews and see what the core legal theory being created is.

The most important thing however is to always keep the Black letter rules in mind. This refers to having a standard element for a particular field of law that is popular and not having dispute or doubt.