Legal Research

Legal Research

Repeatable workflow for researching a legal issue, prioritizing controlling authority, and documenting a filing-ready research trail.

Use this skill for the overall research process.

Use authority-verification when the task specifically requires citation verification, source retrieval, or case.dev-based authority checks.

Quick Start

1. Frame the legal question as one issue at a time.
2. Identify jurisdiction, court level, and governing instruments.
3. Collect primary authority first.
4. Expand to persuasive and secondary authority only where needed.
5. Synthesize the rule, competing authorities, and factual application.
6. Recheck authorities immediately before filing.

Core Workflow

1. Frame the issue

Define:

• legal question
• elements or standards
• requested relief
• factual assumptions that matter to the answer

2. Scope the forum

Identify:

• governing jurisdiction
• controlling court level
• procedural posture
• any local rules or standing orders that affect the analysis

3. Collect primary authority

Start with:

• constitutions
• statutes
• regulations
• controlling cases
• local rules

4. Expand outward

Use persuasive authority and secondary sources to:

• fill doctrinal gaps
• compare competing approaches
• confirm terminology
• identify additional primary sources

5. Synthesize

Produce:

• rule statement
• authority hierarchy
• factual analogies
• risks, splits, and counterarguments
• open questions requiring more research

6. Update before filing

Before relying on the work product:

• recheck the controlling authorities
• confirm current statutory and regulatory text
• confirm local rules
• record the date of the final update

Research Trail

Always preserve:

• search query or issue label
• source consulted
• why the source matters
• jurisdiction and court level
• date checked
• unresolved questions

Pitfalls

• Starting with secondary sources and never tracing back to primary authority.
• Mixing binding and persuasive authority without labeling the difference.
• Ignoring procedural posture or standard of review.
• Omitting adverse authority.
• Treating stale research as filing-ready.