How Legal Research Gives Lawyers an Edge in Court

If you become a lawyer, you’ll probably realize that there are many areas of the law you might enter. You might become a corporate lawyer who represents a business entity. Maybe you want to get into personal injury law instead. You might get into tax law or environmental law.

If you’re the sort of lawyer who sometimes needs to appear in court, you’ll presumably want to prepare for those appearances with the utmost care. You’ll need to pick out your favorite outfit, style your hair, and generally do all you can to make a great impression. However, you may also want to do some legal research.  

Locating the best legal research tools then becomes vital. You can find several with modern features that make it easy for you locate the information you need. 

You might not feel sure about how legal research gives you the potential edge in court, though. We will talk about that in detail in the following article.

The Law Often Hinges on What Came Before

First, you should know something about the law. It’s not the same in every state. That’s why, in some instances, if you’re very familiar with state laws, you will have the edge over your opposition if you’re arguing for or against something. 

If you know about the more obscure laws of that state, you might be able to mention one that makes what your client did or didn’t do more permissible. If you didn’t know about that law, then you obviously couldn’t mention it.

If you are unprepared as a lawyer, then that can backfire. You might lose a personal injury case for your client, for instance, if you didn’t know about a law that would have helped them.

The law hinges on what came before. If there’s precedent for something, even if you have to go back hundreds of years to find it, then you should do that. If you’re getting into completely new legal territory, though, that’s when you might find yourself at a disadvantage, regardless of how much you studied. 

You Can Cite Precedent if You Did Your Research 

If you did your research, and you know that you can bring up a certain law or statute that favors your client, then you can cite precedent when trying to help the individual or company that you’re representing. If there’s established precedent from some previous case that deals with what your client did or didn’t do, then you can bring it up, and the opposition might have little they can say as a rebuke. 

That’s why some lawyers take the time to research for days or weeks before they appear in court. If there is a lot of money on the line or a lengthy prison sentence for their client, you can feel certain a lawyer will look into the dustiest annals of legal history if they think that it might help their cause. 

If You Did Your Research, You Can Ambush the Opposing Counsel

Any time you have a courtroom battle with two lawyers or law firms opposing each other, it is like a duel or a battle of wits. Composure and the ability to argue about something convincingly certainly helps. However, you will need more than that to get an edge over a lawyer with strong verbal skills and a combative demeanor. 

If you can find precedent for something that the opposing counsel did not expect, though, you can pull that out and use it at just the right moment. They might feel like they have your client backed into a corner. Then, you can mention an old case that established a precedent and will directly impact how the law views your client’s actions.

If you can do that, then you might render the opposing counsel speechless. They will have no way to counter a law or statute that they did not know about beforehand, and that might win you some major points in a jury trial.

However, if you are facing off against a skilled lawyer from a reputable law firm, then landing that knockout punch with an obscure law or citing precedent from a little-known legal case will take both timing and skill. 

Law Clerks Can Help with This

That is why, when you see a lawyer get up in court and argue a case, you will not see the whole team they have behind them. A lawyer will only have so many hours available to them in a day. They will likely spend a lot of it meeting with clients or in a courtroom setting. 

They will probably not have the time to do the research necessary to find the obscure cases that established a precedent that might help their client and sink the opposing counsel’s strategy. That’s why a lawyer will often have some law clerks who can do this research for them.

It’s just the same as when you see a batter step up to the plate at the major league level. You won’t see the hitting coach who helped him to adjust his stance or who lobbed balls over the plate for him so he could work on his swing.

Law clerks usually want to become lawyers eventually. By researching obscure cases to help the lawyer they are working for, they are getting a behind-the-scenes look at how the legal system operates. A clerk will usually help their employer win in a courtroom setting, since the attorney won’t typically have the time or inclination to find those laws and precedents that can make such a huge difference in fiercely contested cases. 

Any time a lawyer can do research to get ready for a trial, they will do so, but they might also have a whole team of individuals backing them up. The larger the firm and the more prestigious the case, the more you will probably see frenzied activity behind the scenes that sets up the action taking place in the courtroom.