---
name: legal-research
description: Use when asked to conduct legal research — finding and analyzing statutes, case law, and regulations to answer a legal question — as the foundational skill underlying legal-brief-writing and most other legal-practice work in this collection.
---

# Legal Research

Legal research is the process of identifying and analyzing the
authorities (statutes, case law, regulations, and secondary sources)
relevant to a legal question, to determine what the law is and how it
applies to a specific set of facts.

## Core process

1. **Identify the legal issue** — frame the question precisely; a
   vague issue produces unfocused, inefficient research.
2. **Identify applicable jurisdiction** — law varies significantly by
   country, and often by state/province within a country; research
   conducted in the wrong jurisdiction is not just unhelpful but can be
   actively misleading.
3. **Consult primary sources** — statutes/legislation, regulations, and
   case law (judicial decisions) are the actual binding authority.
4. **Consult secondary sources** — legal treatises, law review
   articles, and practice guides help locate and interpret primary
   authority faster, but aren't binding themselves.
5. **Verify currency** — confirm a statute hasn't been amended and a
   case hasn't been overturned or distinguished since publication;
   legal research tools flag this ("negative treatment" or similar).
6. **Synthesize** — combine findings into a clear answer to the
   original question, with supporting citations.

## Why jurisdiction and currency matter so much

Two of the most consequential research mistakes are researching the
wrong jurisdiction's law and relying on since-overturned or amended
authority. Both produce confident-sounding but wrong answers — legal
research tools' citation-checking features exist specifically to catch
the second problem, and shouldn't be skipped even under time pressure.

## Common pitfalls

- **Treating a secondary source as if it were binding authority** — a
  practice guide's summary of the law is a starting point for finding
  the actual primary authority, not a substitute for citing it.
- **Skipping negative-treatment checks** — citing a case without
  confirming it hasn't been overturned or significantly limited by
  later decisions.
- **Researching without a clear jurisdiction in mind** — especially
  easy to slip into when using general-purpose research tools not
  scoped to a specific jurisdiction by default.
- **Stopping at the first plausible answer** — a genuinely thorough
  answer often requires checking whether authority conflicts across
  courts or has evolved over time, not just finding one supporting
  citation.

## Learn more

- [[legal-brief-writing]] for turning research findings into a persuasive written argument.
- [[legal-due-diligence]] for a related, broader investigatory process.