[2/2] Legal Research in 3 Simple Steps: Online Legal Databases

In Part 1, I have attempted to demonstrate a simple but workable methodology to carry out legal research using hardcopy materials. The focus of this post will be on carrying out legal research using online legal databases, which I would describe to be a different ball game entirely.

Navigating through online legal databases were as alien as aeronautical science itself. After all, it would be surprising if any of us knew what we were doing with these devices in the first place. My law school recognised this problem and attempted to organise legal research workshops for first-year law students to teach them how to source useful and relevant case laws from online legal databases. If you are reading this, I believe many of you would have attended a similar workshop at your respective law schools at some point, and we all know how that went. It doesn’t help that your law lecturers or tutors were less than helpful by doing nothing but telling you condescendingly that “you’re supposed to pick this up by yourself cause you’re going to be a future lawyer”. The purpose of this post is to help you understand the fundamentals techniques to research for case laws on online legal databases effectively as best as I can.

In order to do this, I will divide this post into 2 sections: (a) online legal databases and (b) how to ensure you make use of keywords to find the right case for you.

ONLINE LEGAL DATABASES: AN INTRODUCTION

If you need to research case laws in much greater detail, you will have to resort to these. The most common online legal databases include Westlaw and LexisNexis (or Lexis®Library in certain jurisdictions, they’re the same). The major problem I encountered as a law student was that these databases appeared less than user-friendly at first simply because they were hard to navigate. There are so many sections! Where exactly do I begin? What are "search connectors" anyway? But I soon realised there is a simple methodology to identify the case you’re finding. At least, one that I managed to create over time as I carried out my own legal research. I will now share this technique with you.

The methodology I am about to demonstrate will take place in the 'Cases' section of Westlaw and the 'Advanced search: Cases' section on Lexis. They will look like these:

This will appear on Westlaw.

You will first encounter this page upon logging into Lexis. Note the "Advanced Search: Cases" section. Click that and you should be redirected to the page below:

You are now at the right place.

(a) Be familiar with search connectors

For each legal database, there are “search connectors”. Think of these as mathematical formulae for legal research: they are the bridge between the relevant keywords** which will help you arrive at an answer (being the case you are looking for).

For Westlaw, these are the connectors (in order of usefulness, IMO):

Where exactly do you key in these connectors? First, you will have to type your keywords in the 'Free Text' row on the top of the page. With the exception of the quotation marks ("[keywords]"), insert these connectors between your first and second (and third and so on) keywords (e.g. Word A & Word B; or, Word B +s Word C).

As for LexisNexis/Lexis®Library, the process is more or less the same. Type your keywords in the 'Terms' row on the top of the page. For most search connectors, slot them in between your keywords. However, there are more connectors in which you are supposed to insert your keywords following the connectors, and I have marked them with (insert keyword) to indicate which connector requires you to type in your keywords only after the connector in question. These are the connectors for Lexis (also in order of usefulness, IMO):

*(I haven’t had to resort to any of these connectors personally. The other search connectors above does the job much more effectively IMO.)

You don't have to deliberately attempt to memorise these. Like mathematical formulae, familiarity with these connectors will come over time as you use them more and more frequently. Instead, you should pay close attention to the next two stages of this methodology as they are capable of being the most arduous and difficult aspect of legal research on these platforms.

(b) Apply the keywords to search connectors

Here comes the tricky part, and often where most students (and, sometimes, lawyers) often get stuck – applying the correct keywords to the appropriate connectors to arrive at the right result (or results).

Think of identifying the right keywords as a legal version of wordplay. Try to reflect on your previous encounters in any area of law just for a second: you will realise that (i) there are variations of a particular word, (ii) you can associate multiple words together in a particular area of law, and (iii) in any area of law you are researching, there will be recurring words such as a passage/passages in a case law OR the case name itself, however specific the area is.

To demonstrate what I have just said above, let us use the following sample research topic: assume that I have to find for an English case on rescission of contract on the basis of alleged misrepresentation in the clause of a contract, and that I have zero knowledge in this area. How do I go about finding this on Lexis?

Understanding the wordplay strategy: choosing the correct keywords

Depending on how familiar you are with the area of law at hand, you may have to resort to textbooks and practitioner’s texts on the subject matter to ‘source’ for keywords. These materials will often provide you with notable cases in that area (or sub-area) of law, or perhaps a statement of law/opinion that lawyers and judges regard as well-accepted. In short, if you do not know which keywords to adopt for your research, read up first. That way, you will have a starting point to begin your game of wordplay. Refer to Part 1 on carrying out legal research using hardcopy materials here.

From the research topic example above, I am able to gather a few keywords and they are underlined here: “rescission of contract” is a must, and has no alternatives given that it is such a common legal term of art. Then there is ‘misrepresentation’, which have present and past tense variables (‘misrepresented’) and so on. As for ‘clause’, they might be expressed in synonyms such as ‘article’ and ‘stipulation’.

This example highlights the importance for you to bear in mind that keywords have to be altered frequently in your search so as to ensure you don’t miss anything out, sometimes manually or by using wildcard characters. These are essentially symbols that will enable your search result to include documents with different variations of a single word, and you can save a lot of time by avoiding altering your search terms manually every single time.

There are 2 types of wildcard characters (applicable to both Westlaw and Lexis):

With these in mind, let us now explore the precise techniques to yield some tangible results. I usually use one of these 2 methods:

Method A: Apply ALL the relevant keywords to the appropriate search connectors within a single search.

This is straightforward. All online legal databases are capable of processing multiple keywords and search connectors, so if you have a good idea of the keywords you need to use in your search, this is the quickest method to arrive at a solution.

So, using the sample research topic above, I will attempt to use and apply the following keywords to the search connectors and type it down in the 'Terms' section of Lexis (as seen above):

["rescission of contract" AND misrepresentation w/p clause]

And voila! The search result indicates 11 cases, and by reading the headnotes of these cases, I also know that 4 of these cases are directly relevant to my sample research topic. Of course, not all these cases will ultimately be useful in my research, and I would have to read the case summary and headnotes to know what each of these cases actually talk about – but it is sufficient to demonstrate how Method A is capable of narrowing your search result down to a select few documents.

In my experience, this method works best when carrying research into very specified areas of law – e.g. I have had to research on a particular exception to res judicata and this method saved me a lot of time in my research. But the major downside is you need to know which keywords to use in your search: you might end up with nothing relevant at all if you do not pick them carefully, or, you risk missing out something if you do not explore multiple keywords (as I have mentioned above)

Protip: keep a list of all the keywords and search connectors you have used. Too often people can lose track halfway and this can often be a huge waste of time!

Method B: Go general by using the first keywords and search connectors, and narrow it down further as you search along the way.

This is essentially step-by-step and works in the opposite order from Method A: here, you start off with a general search and head forward to the specific (whereas Method A is a deliberate attempt to start from a specific point and head towards a more general search as you work your way backwards). The wildcard characters are equally applicable in this method, so make use of them in your research.

Using the same research topic above as an example, this would be an illustration Method B:

At the end of this exercise, there are 7 cases in my search result, and virtually all of them are directly relevant to my sample research topic. You will immediately notice that the search results are much narrower than Method A – this is due to the extra-focused nature of your search technique.

Method B is particularly useful if you are looking for a specific point (such as particular factual patterns in reported cases, how an exception to a general rule was applied by the courts, and so on) in an established area of law. This is because you will often face considerable difficulty to identify the right keywords to search for these case laws, and it would be much more effective for you to start from the general and dive into the specifics instead. You might be able to identify certain keywords that are relevant to your research topic through this process.

This method is also very, very useful (if not absolutely necessary) if you are looking for cases that involve specific statutory provisions (i.e. statute-based case laws). Both Westlaw and Lexis enable users to search for a particular legislation and specific legislative provisions within it, and provide users the options of searching for cases that deal with the particular legislative provision in question. By searching this way, step 1 of Method B will be replaced with looking up the legislative provision in question on the 'Legislation' sections on Westlaw and Lexis and select 'Cases citing' (for Westlaw) or 'Find Related Cases & Commentary' (for Lexis). From that point, steps 2 and 3 will essentially remain the same.

The ultimate takeaway from these approaches: these are NOT hard and fast rules!

You might get the impression that Methods A and B are binary and completely separate methodologies. That is not true. To the contrary, these methods will invariably overlap as you research into much more developed and/or complicated areas. In fact, they should not be viewed as separate processes – as you carry out legal research more frequently, you will actually have to utilise these 2 methods together (but separately of course) when researching into a particular area. But I find this practice to be extremely useful to master the basics – it will prepare you for the task much better over time.

Conclusion

Legal research is one of the fundamental aspects of legal education itself, whether you wish to pursue law as a career or otherwise. I fall in the latter category, and I wondered if legal research has any utility at all beyond law. However, following the end of my journey in legal education, my constant reflections have revealed that legal research is, in its own right, an extremely unique craft. People often describe ‘legal research’ as a unitary set of skills, and that is true on the face of it. However, I have come to adopt a different perspective as I delved deeper: legal research represents an amalgamation of legal scholastic formalism with wordplay through the lenses of methodological analysis. That in itself imparts a limitless amount of invaluable skills that are transferable to various other industries or professions. It is a process that is not only simple to understand, but also enjoyable. My only hope is that you will share the same level of enjoyment in this as I have and impart it to others who need it.

**keywords are actually known as ‘search terms’ on Westlaw and Lexis and base word is known as ‘root’. I decided not to use the actual terms here because I wanted to simplify the explanation for you to understand the process much more easily.