Effective Approaches to Legal Research

1 Credit Hour

Effective Approaches to Legal Research: This one-credit, "bootcamp" format course will take a very pragmatic approach to legal research, oriented toward providing students with the ability to address legal research questions and projects that may come up in their summer employment or other legal work. Students will learn the most effective and efficient methods for locating legal and other information with an emphasis on the contemporary research needs in the professional world, including not only case-law and statutory research, but also research in court dockets and court rules, document drafting resources, legislative and administrative research, complex secondary resource tools, and also non-legal research including business and corporate research and investigative research. The emphasis will be on locating information as effectively as possible using whatever print, Internet, database or Lexis Advance/Westlaw Next/Bloomberg Law resource is most applicable to the information. In the "Bootcamp" format, the course will meet for three hours a day, each day over a four day period. The course will meet on May 19, 20, 21 and 22 from 9am-12pm. The course sessions will include a mix of presentation, examples, exercises, workshops, and directed work. Each day will conclude with a research assignment to be completed by the next day. The course grade will be based on the completed research assignments along with the in-class exercises and class participation. Attendance at all 12 class hours will be mandatory. The course will be team-taught by the Pritzker Legal Research Center's Instructional Librarians including Profs. George Pike, Heidi Kuehl, Jamie Sommer, and Maribel Nash.