Legal Research Demystified

Professors can view a detailed list of changes from the second edition of Legal Research Demystified here.

Legal Research Demystified provides a practical approach to legal research. The textbook guides law students through eight steps to research common law issues and ten steps to research statutory issues. These research steps are demonstrated through factual hypotheticals and visual aids. Students and professors have praised the textbook for its illustrative charts, such as charts on KeyCite and Shepard's, Boolean searching, and finding relevant secondary sources and statutes.

The third edition includes a new chapter on leveraging generative AI (GenAI) for legal research. The chapter covers how GenAI works, five good uses of GenAI for legal research, creating effective prompts for research projects (RICER framework), evaluating AI-generated responses for accuracy and completeness, and the risks and limitations of using GenAI. The chapter also equips students to identify fake authorities and other inaccurate information in AI responses.

Other key updates to the third edition include the following:

• Added section on GenAI in the chapter on secondary sources.
• Updated four charts on the KeyCite and Shepard's negative treatment signals for statutes and cases to incorporate the latest citator signals.
• Revised charts on methods to find statutes and limitations of citators to provide more guidance to students.
• Added sections on case annotations and sorting search results in the chapter on interpretive cases.
• Shifted focus to the Key Number System on Westlaw instead of the print digest to reflect current usage.
• Included a chart summarizing finding tools available for secondary sources, statutes, and cases to help students navigate the research process.
• Updated Westlaw and Lexis screen captures throughout the book.

With the purchase of a new book, students gain free access to the assessment platform of Core Knowledge for Lawyers. That online platform contains interactive questions and exercises that map to Legal Research Demystified, featuring:

• Assessment quizzes (auto-grading) for each chapter to test student comprehension.
• Interactive research exercises, including auto-grading exercises on using GenAI for legal research, running Boolean searches, and performing statutory and common law research on Westlaw and Lexis.
• Instant feedback to students after each question—similar to Core Grammar and MBIE.
• A robust instructor dashboard—professors can view individual and class performance.