You’re a young, tech-savvy associate and a partner has just made you responsible for researching the legal issue central to your client’s case and finding the appropriate precedential authority to support the key argument the partner wants to make. And, by the way, you have 24 hours to come up with the answer.
Like a rite of passage, those of us who practice in litigation have found ourselves in this position at various stages of our careers. In ancient days (i.e., when I started practicing), it was straight to the library to pull out a hornbook, a volume of Corpus Juris Secundum or perhaps the West Key Number Digest. With luck, this led to a list of legal citations to track down, review, and then, if relevant, to Shepardize to confirm they remained good law.
In the digital age, the process of legal research has been streamlined mightily by research databases such as Lexis or Westlaw, which offer the added benefit of incorporating the Shepardizing process within their vast capabilities. Additionally, with so many scholarly articles pervading the Internet, even a pedestrian search engine inquiry can sometimes provide a good head start (although I have yet to try it with Siri).
