We spoke to a veteran legal research expert, who currently works to train lawyers in Thomson Reuters' Westlaw and LawTab products, to find out some of the tips and tricks to legal research that many lawyers probably don't know about.

1. Tab it

Most people just dive straight into the homepage search bar with their keywords. Well, you can save a lot of time by honing in on a broader category first.

Nearly every major research platform has tabs on specific areas of law or jurisdictions, so if your research task fits one of these topics go there first.

Make sure you familiarise yourself with the categories so you'll know in future - for example, Westlaw has the little known 'moot courts' option in the International Materials screen, which is specifically tailored to give you results and resources useful in a moot court.

2. Alerts: Sit back and let cases come to you

One very powerful feature that not enough lawyers make use of is the 'alerts' feature, which exists on some of the more well-known platforms in some form or other.

All you need to do for an alert is to specify a set of search criteria, and the database will email you every day / weekly / monthly, all new cases, articles or other new items in the database that match your keywords.

This is also very useful when tracking a specific case, so you are alerted when a judgment is out, or even tracking specific case references, so you can find out if other judgments cite a case that is important to your practice or one of your clients.

The best way to use alerts is to start out with a normal search on the subject area that you want to be kept on top of, but make sure you narrow it down slightly. A search / alert for intellectual property by itself could swamp you with too many results, whereas a more specific search for “intellectual property” and infringement, will give you more targeted alerts.

Once you are happy with the results that a search has produced, turn that into an alert, and don't be afraid to tweak it later, if you find that the results it produces are too wide, narrow or inappropriate.

3. Funnel your search

As a general philosophy to searching, start broad and then hone in to become more specific.

In other words, don't start with a complex search query with 15 keywords, ands, nots, and so on, but start with three or four search words first, and see what results that turns up, then gradually and carefully add more keywords and search operators to hone your results to what is useful.

Read on to find out how.

4. Simple search logic

Narrowing down your search needs to be done with so-called “boolean operators”, which are actually very simple to understand once you get the hang of them.

And while every database might have a slightly different way of doing things, some of the boolean operators are pretty much universal. The basic ones you absolutely must know are:

and

or

These let you string keywords together to specify exactly what you are looking for.

By default, on most modern platforms such as Westlaw, if you search for:

crime youth

it will find you all cases that contain both crime AND youth (a few other platforms, however, find cases that contain crime OR youth OR both, resulting in much wider results).

If you're not sure about what logic your search engine uses, specify manually what you like by using and / or.

If searching for:

crime and youth or juvenile or teenager or adolescent

this will find all cases containing the word crime, as well as at least one of the words youth, juvenile, teenager, or adolescent.

A bonus is that most modern platforms, such as Westlaw, don't need you to search for singular and plural forms separately: so a search for juvenile will turn up juveniles, and a search for child will also turn up irregular plural versions such as children. Generally, try to stick with singular search terms, as databases are more likely to be able to handle them properly.

Capitalisation is ignored by most engines, so you can search completely in lowercase.

5. “Quote unquote”, narrowing

Quote marks work just as they do in Google. If searching for:

“intellectual property”

with quote marks, this will only find you results where the words intellectual and property appear right next to each other.

This also works well for excerpt from judgments quoted in newspapers – just take the quote from the newspaper, and put it into quotation marks in your search, and you'll have good odds of finding the judgment in the database.

Another powerful tool is the proximity search, by which you can specify how close your keywords should be together.

Be aware, that these are often different for each platform. In Westlaw, for example, use

injury /s accident

to find all cases where the words injury and accident, appear in the same sentence.

Likewise, use

/p

between words to only find words appearing in the same paragraph, and finally, by linking two words with

/5

or any other /number operator in Westlaw, you can specify that the two words should be within 5 or any N number of words of each other.

6. Use brackets with your boolean

Note that the or operator will get searched before and by all legal search engines, so:

salad and apple or orange and fruit

(bold emphasis added) would find you only documents that contained the words words apple or orange or both, in addition to having to contain the words fruit and salad.

However, this can get confusing if you end up with long search queries:

salad and apple and walnut or rocket and spinach

would give you a salad with either walnut or rocket or both, as well as apple AND spinach (i.e., it would search for the two words connected with ‘or’ first, and then search all matching results for the ‘and’-connected words).

So if you want more advanced structures and to ensure the search is done properly, put searches that you want done first, in brackets (just as in basic maths, where brackets, multiplication and division come ahead of addition and subtraction):

salad and (apple and walnut) or (rocket and spinach).

This will find you any salads that have both apple and walnut in them (but not mere apple salads), as well as rocket and spinach salads (but not salads that just have rocket, or spinach).

7. More advanced searching

Unfortunately most legal research platforms have slightly different ways of expressing more complicated searches, so make sure you read the online help to confirm which ones work and which don't.

In Westlaw, use:

Using some of the above techniques, you should be able to find even the most obscure and hidden cases that will help you and your client.

If you have any research-related questions, please leave those in the comments.

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