If you are working on a motion brief, your research questions will be crucial components of your research plan.

Whether you are writing a motion brief or an appellate brief, however, your research questions can help to guide your research. As noted above, the “under” clause can be a signal as to how much background research you need to conduct.

Once you have a basic understanding of how your jurisdiction treats this particular area of law, step back for a moment and take a look at the big picture. Although your main goal is to identify support for your arguments, an effective research plan can also help you to discover new arguments. You may wish to use particular research methods when researching a statutory issue, when writing to a court of last resort, or when deciding how to use mandatory versus nonmandatory authorities.

A particular word of advice to those who are accustomed to using electronic search engines such as Google: Many law students begin law school feeling as though they are accomplished researchers because they have spent much of their lives using computer systems to find answers to questions both large and small. Recognize, however, that the questions you are asking in legal research are usually more complex, and they therefore require more time and careful attention when searching for an answer. If you use Google or another search engine to ask a simple question with a definite answer, you are likely to get dozens or hundreds of “hits.” If you scan the first half-dozen or so of those hits and find that they agree with each other, you would be sensible to stop researching and be satisfied with the answer you have received. In legal research, however, you are often asking a more complex question, and you will often ask questions that could have more than one answer. If you have an expectation that the answer will bubble to the surface after your first query, you may be misled as to the state of the law or become frustrated in your research, thinking that something is wrong because you can’t find an argument as easily as expected.

This is not to say that you cannot use Google or other nonlegal search engines to assist you in your research. Just realize that legal research requires more thoroughness and more patience than the nonlegal searches you may have conducted in the past. If you have not yet become proficient in conducting Boolean, or “terms and connectors” research, now is a good time to do so. These searches allow you to find legal sources with more precision.²⁷ Professor Susan Nevelow Mart, of the University of Colorado, has studied the algorithms used by the popular legal research databases.²⁸She notes that differences in algorithms can give you drastically different results with so-called natural language searches in the different databases. Even Boolean searches can have some differences in result; in my experience, however, Boolean searches are worthwhile precisely because their results are likely to be much more similar across different databases.