Legal Research Task
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A Legal Research Task is a legal analysis task that is a domain-specific research task that identifies and retrieves information necessary to support legal decision-making.
- Context:
- input: Legal Questions, Legal Research Objectives, Legal Situation Facts, Legal Information (e.g. legal terminology, legal statutes).
- output: Legal Findings, Research Summaries, or Annotated Legal Documents.
- It can (typically) involve inputs of Legal Databases, case law libraries, legal texts, legislation, and other legal resources.
- It can (typically) precede ...
- It can (often) be carried out by Legal Professionals.
- It can (often) support Legal Processes, such as: legal case Preparation, legal policy development, legal writing, or legal advice.
- It can (often) be supported by Legal Research Software.
- It can range from being Legal Qualitative Research to being Legal Quantitative Research.
- It can (often) involve Critical Thinking, Analytical Skills, and Attention to Detail.
- ...
- Example(s):
- Contract Law Research: Investigating issues such as contract formation, contract execution, contract interpretation, and contract enforcement.
- Case Law Research: Identifying and analyzing relevant judicial opinions and precedents to support legal arguments and decisions.
- Statutory Research: Examining legislative texts and legislative histories to understand the application and interpretation of statutes.
- Regulatory Research: Analyzing administrative rules and agency guidance to determine their impact on specific industries or practices.
- Compliance Research: Investigating legal requirements and standards to ensure that an organization adheres to relevant laws and regulations.
- Comparative Legal Research: Comparing laws and legal systems of different jurisdictions to identify similarities, differences, and potential influences.
- ...
- Counter-Example(s):
- Market Research: Gathering and analyzing data about a market, including its size, competitors, and consumer behavior.
- Scientific Research: Investigating phenomena using the scientific method to generate new knowledge or validate existing theories.
- Historical Research: Studying past events, cultures, and people to understand the course of history.
- ...
- See: Free Access to Law Movement, Law, Legal System, Sources of Law, Primary Authority, Jurisdiction, Case Law, Statutes, Regulations, Secondary Authority, Law Review, Law Dictionary, Legal Precedent.
References
2024
- (Magesh et al., 2024) ⇒ Varun Magesh, Faiz Surani, Matthew Dahl, Mirac Suzgun, Christopher D. Manning, and Daniel E Ho. (2024). “Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools.” In: Stanford preprint.
- NOTES:
- The study evaluates AI-driven legal research tools: LexisNexis's Lexis+ AI, Thomson Reuters's Ask Practical Law AI, Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research (AI-AR), and GPT-4, focusing on their tendency to produce false information or "hallucinations."
- The study utilized a diverse set of 202 preregistered legal queries categorized into general legal research, jurisdiction/time-specific questions, false premise questions, and factual recall questions.
2023a
- (GM-RKB ChatGPT, 2023) ⇒ Summarize the concept Legal Research Task in 1- 2 paragraphs, promt.GM-RKB ChatGPT (model: gpt-4-1106-preview) Retrieved: 2023-12-10
- QUOTE: A legal research task involves the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. At its core, it includes the systematic investigation of legal authorities such as statutes, case law, regulations, treaties, and legal scholarship to find answers to legal questions or to check for legal precedents that can be used in formulating a legal argument or making a judicial ruling. The purpose of legal research is to find sources of law that will aid in finding a solution to a legal problem.
Legal research is typically performed by lawyers, law clerds, paralegals, or law students. The process may involve several steps, including identifying the legal issues involved, choosing relevant legal databases or physical materials, selecting and applying appropriate research strategies, reviewing and analyzing the found materials for relevance and authority, and updating the research with the most current sources to ensure the law has not changed. The end product of a legal research task is often a written legal memorandum, brief, or argument that synthesizes and presents the research in a way that is accessible and persuasive to a court, client, or other legal audience.
- QUOTE: A legal research task involves the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. At its core, it includes the systematic investigation of legal authorities such as statutes, case law, regulations, treaties, and legal scholarship to find answers to legal questions or to check for legal precedents that can be used in formulating a legal argument or making a judicial ruling. The purpose of legal research is to find sources of law that will aid in finding a solution to a legal problem.
2023b
- (Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/legal_research Retrieved:2023-6-6.
- Legal research is "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication of the results of the investigation." The processes of legal research vary according to the country and the legal system involved. Legal research involves tasks such as:
- Finding primary sources of law, or primary authority, in a given jurisdiction (cases, statutes, regulations, etc.).
- Searching secondary authority, for background information about a legal topics. Secondary authorities can come in many forms (for example, law reviews, legal dictionaries, legal treatises, and legal encyclopedias such as American Jurisprudence and Corpus Juris Secundum).
- Searching non-legal sources for investigative or supporting information.
- Legal research is performed by anyone with a need for legal information, including lawyers, law librarians, and paralegals. Sources of legal information range from printed books, to free legal research websites (like Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, Findlaw.com, Martindale Hubbell or CanLII) and information portals to fee database vendors such as Wolters Kluwer, LexisNexis, Westlaw, Lex Intell, VLex and Bloomberg Law. Law libraries around the world provide research services to help their patrons find the legal information they need in law schools, law firms and other research environments. Many law libraries and institutions provide free access to legal information on the web, either individually or via collective action, such as with the Free Access to Law Movement.
- Legal research is "the process of identifying and retrieving information necessary to support legal decision-making. In its broadest sense, legal research includes each step of a course of action that begins with an analysis of the facts of a problem and concludes with the application and communication of the results of the investigation." The processes of legal research vary according to the country and the legal system involved. Legal research involves tasks such as: