Paralegals are usually the right arm of a lawyer or a notary. One task that come frequently is to do juridic research for them. That means that we become a compiler of relevant information and synthesize it. For this presentation, we'll say that a lawyer asks me to help him with a case of criminal negligence. His client is accused of killing someone while he was using his cellphone while driving.
1. Step 1: Use a legal data bank to do the research. Many are free and they are regularly updated. I use CAIJ data bank because his really user-friendly and a lot of contents are free access.
Step 2 : Looking for doctrine first. Doctrine is term used for publications by jurists. It could be an article in a law review, a book or an annotated law. The reason why we begin with doctrine is really simple. A lawyer may have asked the same question as you and shared his research.
Step 3: Choose the relevant keywords. We can't use a complete sentence in research data bank. It's important to have a good comprehension of the issue to not lose hours and hours. And also it's a lot of reading. In that case the keywords would be criminal negligence, cell phone and driving.
Step 4: Use research operators. Every data banks have it. They are similar but not identical from one data bank to another. They are essential to refine research. For example, if I put the term criminal negligence between quotation marks, it's mean that I just want the result with this exact written. Without the quotation marks, that will give any result with the word criminal and the word negligence. But I still have too many results, so I will use another research operators :and. If I wrote : «criminal negligence» and driving or
« criminal negligence» and « cellphone», the search will show me only the texts that contain these keywords in the same text.
Step 5: Looking for the law who applies. Sometimes it's evident and other times less so. In that case, it's easy to deduce that Criminal law apply because the client is accused to the Criminal Court of Quebec but is the Highway Safety Code applies? A careful research will answer that.
Step 6: Looking for the jurisprudence. This term mean decision by the court. Most of the court decisions are really detailed. The judge writes a summary of the facts, mentions the applicable laws and articles of law and explain in detail the reason for his decision. In the best of all worlds, you will find positive and negative decisions. That will give a good view on the chances of success of a file and the criteria on which the court relies.
//https://www.caij.qc.ca/en/