Become a Computer-Savvy Associate

BY jennifer daniels and erin o’brien harkiewicz Special to the Law Weekly





The great day has finally arrived – the day you have been dreaming of since you first decided to go to law school – your first real assignment for an actual law firm. More likely than not, this assignment is a legal research assignment. No problem, you think, I’ve taken legal writing. You walk happily up to the office of the assigning attorney to discuss the assignment. As you wait to be summoned inside, you reflect on your feelings. You are excited. You are proud. You are … suddenly terrified.





You realize that you can’t remember the difference between a reporter and a digest, that the only bluebook form you can remember is the correct citation to the constitution of Fiji, and that, even though the firm tour ended only 10 minutes ago, you don’t even remember what floor the library is on, much less how to get back there. Even worse, you look down again at the assignment sheet and you notice that not only have you never even heard of any of the statutes mentioned in the assignment description, at the bottom of the page, it says, “Emergency Request – due tomorrow. Please limit electronic research.”



Don’t panic.



Although the skills you have learned as a law student will be of great value to you over the summer, it is true that legal research for a law firm is different that legal research for law school.



There are two things that you have as a law student that you don’t have as a summer associate: unlimited time and unlimited Westlaw or Lexis use. If your legal writing professor asks you to research whether obesity is a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, you can log into Westlaw to get your answers. You type “obese” into the ALLFEDS database and spend three hours paging through the 612 cases retrieved during television commercials while talking on the phone with a friend. No one will question that you were logged on for four hours.



As a summer associate you will often be expected to do legal research using the dreaded “books.” And you will also be expected to be productive at some point between breakfast with the head of the litigation department, a two-hour lunch with the labor associates, the scavenger hunt at 4 p.m, and the concert that starts immediately after.



So, from our combined experience of four years of summer associateship at a large Center City firm, we are taking this opportunity to give you some pointers on getting to the “right” answer in a legal research assignment efficiently.



There are four easy steps.

Step One: Understanding the Assignment

The first and most important step to being successful in any legal research assignment is to make sure you understand exactly what the assignment is. Your first instinct will be to sit quietly listening to the assignment, not to interrupt with embarrassingly simple questions and to flee the attorney’s office as fast as possible.



Fight this urge. Attorneys expect that you will ask questions regarding the facts and legal issues involved. They will certainly not be impressed if your final work product does not address the correct issues or is in the wrong format.



One helpful technique is to listen to the attorney’s description of the assignment, and then repeat back to the attorney your understanding of the facts and legal issues involved. For example: “Let me see if I have this right. This is what you want. …”



This will help you to identify areas where you are missing information or are not quite clear regarding the issues. And the attorney will often be reminded of facts or issues that will be helpful and/or necessary to you in completing the assignment simply by listening to his or her directions from your perspective.



Don’t be afraid to ask questions regarding “basic” or “underlying” issues related to the assignment. Attorneys really do understand that you are not an expert in every area of substantive law. It may not be appropriate to expect the assigning attorney to explain all the nuances, but it is appropriate to ask for a quick and dirty explanation of a concept with which you are wholly unfamiliar.



Also, don’t hesitate to go back to the attorney if you feel that it is necessary later on, whether it is because you think you may have missed something the first time or because your research makes it necessary.



You can be sure that the assigning attorney would rather have you come back and “bother” him or her again than receive a final work product that is not correct or is not what he or she needed.



Make certain you understand exactly what form your finished work product should take: A memorandum? A court brief? A letter to the client? A verbal report? All these different formats require that the information you gather be dealt with in different ways. Ask the attorney questions about what he or she expects – how aggressive should a brief be, what level of detail is appropriate for a client letter.



Last but certainly not least, make certain both you and the attorney are clear about the timeline and deadline for the assignment. Find out not only when the final work product is due, but also whether the attorney needs or wants periodic reports or interim drafts.



If the attorney is very laid back about a deadline, try to press him or her for one, even if it is a flexible one that can be changed later. Every young attorney has at least one “war story” about the summer associate assignment they were given without a deadline which, one day at noon, suddenly was needed by 3 p.m. that same day.



Never miss a deadline. If the deadline is approaching and the project is not yet done, don’t simply let the deadline expire and hope that you can finish before the attorney “really needs” the work product and notices that you are late. Speak to the attorney honestly, and see if an extension of the deadline is possible, and if not, how the situation can be handled.

Step Two: Getting Started