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Hey all,

I have been in my law clerk position for about 2 months now and I've come to realize my research skills suck. We primarily use west law, I am familiar with west law but was taught lexis. I feel like I have no solid research method.

Do you guys have any recommendation for legal research skills? Maybe some methods or books I can check out? I usually start with a secondary source and then try to focus in from there, but when there seems to be nothing on point early on I stumble.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

If you have a Westlaw and/or LexisNexis subscription, there is free training you can take advantage of for both services. Those should help somewhat. I heard good things about "Process of Legal Research".

Despite my school providing quite a thorough research class, it mainly boils down to sifting through cases to find things that are on point, but a familiarity with Boolean searches, and how they work with the legal databases, definitely helps separate the wheat from the chaff early on.

Here's the best advice I got.

I am currently in my 1L summer internship and I have literally drafted so many memorandums, that I can bust out a 15 pager in 2 days tops. When I cannot find anything, I google. I will google all sorts of websites and look for information with case citations. Then I plug those cases into westlaw or lexis and start it from there.

And if you cannot find a direct hit, then you need to think outside of the box. For example, I will look to use other words than just ship such as vessel, charter, boat, maritime captain, etc etc. Some interns here tell the associate that they have exhausted all options and can't find sh*t; however, there is a law for everything so I don't advise to do that method. They don't get invited to lunches like myself.