Discussion: Legal Research

In order to make their arguments and win cases, lawyers and legal teams spend a lot of their time researching. By locating laws or previous court rulings, they can more successfully convince judges and jurors to favor their clients. These research skills, however, are not limited to the courtroom. The ability to locate valuable information is a skill that is highly sought after in almost any field of work. People who have honed their research skills are more likely to find lower prices on material goods, recruit the right people to join their team, understand the needs of customers, and predict the behavior of markets and consumers.

For this Discussion, you will expand your research skills by locating sources that support business law topics. You can carry these skills with you and continue to develop them throughout this course, in other courses in this program, and beyond.

To prepare for this Discussion:

• Select a topic related to business law. This could be anything from contract law, to patents, to environmental regulations, et cetera.
• Review the Learning Resources on developing library research skills and focus on the resources that will help you find legal sources to support business decisions.
• After reviewing these resources, locate one primary and one secondary source to support a specific topic related to business law.
• Review the Academic Writing Expectations for 2000/3000-Level Courses.

By Day 3

Post a 150- to 225-word (2- to 3-paragraph) brief write-up on the results of your legal research to support your selected business law topic. In your write-up:

• Briefly describe the topic of business law you chose and provide APA citations for the two sources you located.
• Include a brief summary of each source, as well as its relevance to your business topic.
• Identify each source as primary or secondary and give an example of a situation in which you could utilize these sources in a business environment.