Advanced Legal Research: Researching Secondary Sources & Practice Tools

Let’s talk about things that are not treatises, specifically form books and practice guides. There are two types of legal practice:

  1) Transactional practice or out of court practice; and

  2) Litigation Practice

Transactional practice involves the drafting of contracts, wills, and other documents and advising clients of compliance with the law; and on deal making, etc. There are all types of transactional practice material out there.  There’s no point in you re-inventing the wheel if you don’t have to. Transactional practice material provide collections of sample legal forms that use boiler-plate language.  Often you can get multiple types of a form.  For example, a longer, detailed form or a shorter form. Forms can operate as a checklist to ensure that you do not forget to include something or show you how something is formatted.  Particularly useful are the annotated form sets which will tell you why certain clauses are necessary and let you know whether it is pro-purchaser or pro-seller, etc.

One thing to keep in mind any time you are looking to use a form is that you don’t want to just take a form off the shelf and use it.  You’re going to need to change and adapt it to your jurisdiction and circumstances. 

Fpr Ohio transactional materials see the Ohio Practice Guides & Forms.

  NOTE: These resources are only available to UC Law students and faculty.

Bloomberg Law is a great resource for transactional forms.  Search for forms across content, or check out some specific collections, like ALI-ABA forms, linked to from the Transactional Intelligence Center or the DealMaker Documents and DealMaker Clauses.

   NOTE: These resources are only available to UC Law students and faculty.

Practical Guidance is a resource that has been specifically created for transactional attorneys. It provides start-to-finish, guidance and model documents on a given transaction. The forms within Practical Guidance offer expert guidance, including annotations, drafting notes, alternative clauses and step-by-step instructions on how to complete a form. Practical Guidance forms are “starting point” documents identified as pro-buyer, pro-seller and neutral. From the Lexis+ home screen, select “Practical Guidance” from the left navigation.

Practical Guidance

Practical Guidance Support

   NOTE: These resources are only available to UC Law students and faculty.

Search across content type for forms. You can also set a pre-search filter to specify forms under the content types drop-down. You can also go to Browse Sources > Search Sources > and search "forms" in the box to see what form databases are available.

There are numerous subject specific form databases.

  NOTE: These resources are only available to UC Law students and faculty.

Practical Law is Thompson-Reuters product which is available through your Westlaw subscription. You can use the "Practical Law" to  view practice notes, clauses, articles, and legal updates, etc. to get you familiar with that field. You can also view by state to see resources available for different jurisdictions.

Practical Law

  NOTE: These resources are only available to UC Law students and faculty.

On the Westlaw front page, go to the Content Types tab, click on Forms.