Research in Law, Business & Technology

1.5 Credit Hours

This course will provide students with the necessary tools to conduct basic legal, business, and technology research and evaluate the quality of materials and documents encountered in each discipline. Legal research is a unique skill that involves identifying and assessing relevant cases, statutes, and administrative materials. Business research, meanwhile, focuses on locating company, industry, and consumer market information, as well as examining financial statements and the financial and funding marketplaces. Finally, technology research, particularly in the intellectual property arena, involves identifying owners, licensees, and assignees of intellectual property rights including patents, trademarks and copyrights, as well as identifying and evaluating similar intellectual property concepts and processes, such as research into "prior art" in patent law. The course will explore both commercial database resources and freely accessible Internet-based resources used in each of these fields of research, with special attention paid to the modern trend of utilizing big data and analytics.