Legal Process Outsourcing
The importance of legal research in legal practice
When answering legal questions, lawyers must understand the nuances of the law and the legal precedent. And legal research is the method to collect relevant data to answer these questions. This makes legal research an integral part of the legal profession and an essential skill to have when working on any type of case.
What is legal research?
The first and most important step in legal research is to discover the legal principles and precedents concerning the issue. But this is not as simple as it sounds because collecting information is not hard but curating the most relevant data takes time and effort. Outsourcing legal research is a way to make the process more time- and cost-efficient. And many law firms are incurring more profits by choosing automated legal research solutions over manual research.
The importance and benefits of legal research
Between the two information categories — primary law (focusing on case law, status, and regulations) and secondary sources (explaining the legal theory, like treaties, journals, and digests) — legal research helps you in identifying key facts, legal arguments, and doctrines relevant to the issue at hand. Additionally, legal research allows a comprehensive understanding of an issue by helping you in:
- Analysing the law by breaking it down into separate elements and simplifying understanding and interpretation of specific statutes and cases.
- Forming coherent legal standards by blending distinct elements of different cases and statutes, justifying specific legal decisions.
- Breaking down doctrinal issues and advising legal professionals or clients about the application of legal theories in specific cases, or criticising judicial opinions and resolving conflicts based on legal doctrine.
- Curating teaching material for students to help them understand legal theories, doctrine, statutes, and case laws.
- Arguing for improvements in legal practices and critique legal doctrine from the perspective of economics, sociology, politics, and other sciences.
And with these, legal research offers benefits to legal professionals, such as:
- Get accurate answers to understand the whole issue with the authority. As a result, you can develop a winning strategy and effectively counter any opposing arguments.
- Get comprehensive knowledge about cases, allowing you to explain all the facts and evidence of the case before the authority and the jury.
- Simplify issues by eliminating unnecessary or irrelevant data and allowing you to focus on core facts to argue your case better.
- Provides more value when presenting case evidence and other details in front of the authority by allowing you to understand the underlying legal theory and precedent supporting your arguments.
Overall, legal research allows you to get more clarity about the issue at hand and anticipate different arguments that may come up in the court, giving you more confidence to present your case.
Steps to successfully execute legal research
Legal research is an intricate process, but a few of the major steps to consider while undertaking legal research are:
- Have a clear understanding of the issue under consideration to better evaluate the core details and supporting information uncovered during legal research.
- Understand what sources to study, primary or secondary, as complicated matters may need a more cohesive understanding of both primary and secondary information.
- Collect information once you have a better understanding of the issue at hand and the sources needed to collect the most relevant information.
- Select core information from all the data collected to build well-researched legal arguments and a well-informed strategy that incorporates core details with supporting background information.
- Study deviations to understand potential counterpoints to your arguments and prepare for those.
Going through these steps manually is extremely time-consuming and costly, prompting modern law firms to consider legal research outsourcing. And with modern technological solutions such as automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, cloud-based legal research services are making this process easier, faster, and cost-efficient. This allows them to free up resources and dedicate efforts to more business-critical tasks.
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How can Infosys BPM help?
Infosys BPM Legal Process Management offers customisable legal research services and solutions that are more efficient and cost-effective than manual research.
