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Research Tips for Faculty Research Assistants

This guide supplements training for research assistants for law faculty.

Overview

You should feel fairly comfortable finding cases since you did this for your 1L legal research courses. But remember, your professor may want you to find PDFs of cases from the official reporters, instead of making a PDF of the Westlaw or Lexis version. The best place to try first is Westlaw. Westlaw is known for having many of those. Lexis does not have any of them. If Westlaw doesn't have it, try seeing if the BYU Law Library has the volume and reporter of the case you want. You can send a request (email HickmanA@law.byu.edu) to have it scanned for you if you are working remotely. If a case was never published, a PDF from Lexis or Westlaw is just fine. You will use the Lexis or Westlaw citation when creating a Bluebook citation for a case like that.

Where to Find Cases

How to Search for Cases

A helpful way to search for cases that you might not have tried in your 1L legal research courses is to use the advanced search feature for cases. This works on both Westlaw and Lexis Advance. In the advanced search, you can search for terms in specific fields, like parties, judges, attorneys, etc. It can make narrowing down your list of cases much more precise. Try it out!

Video Tutorials