LEGAL RESEARCH AND THESIS WRITING

Francisco, Patricia B.
Javier, Jewish Leo D.
JD 1-2

Importance of Legal Research and Technologies Available

Everyone is continuously in need of legal information, not just lawyers or

law students like us. This makes the skill of effective legal research one of the
most important skills a law student must achieve. A lot of tasks involved in the
legal profession involve research.

According to the paper entitled The Importance of Legal Research Skills

for Practice by Jamie Baker, a major part of preparing practice ready law
graduates is teaching effective, efficient legal research. According to a study
conducted in 2013 by the Research Intelligence Group called, New Attorney
Research Methods Survey, new attorneys spend more than 30% of their time
doing legal research. 50% think legal research should be a larger part of the
law school curriculum. Employers also rely on new attorneys to be research
experts. But what does being a research expert means? According to Baker,
the legal employers noted that being a research expert means they should be
able to adequately and effectively find everything that is up to the minute. Also,
they should know how to scour books, since not all information readily
available and searchable online.

To be an effective legal researcher, we should be familiar with the

available resources that will make our task easier and faster. According to the
survey conducted by the Research Intelligence Group, 80% of the practicing
law associates use an extensive range of content from traditional primary law
and secondary materials like news, court transcripts, public records and more.
Attorneys also use free online research resources but spend most of their time
over 8 hours per week, using paid-for online research services. In the
Philippines, efforts have been made to make legal resources readily available,
not only to the members of the law profession but to everyone else who would
need it.

The Philippine legal system has a rich history, with the variety and
number of statutes passed. Completing the collection and making this readily
accessible to the public presented to be a huge and difficult task. According to
the paper entitled, Legal Collection Management for Effective Legal Research in
the Philippines, written by Dir. Milagros Santos-Ong of the Supreme Court of
the Philippines Library, retrieval and access to the sources of Philippines law
was a problem due to the lack of complete compilation of sources published or
printed statutes and jurisprudence and lack of updated indexes or search
tools. To resolve the issue, the Supreme Court took over from the National

Printing Office to ensure that the publication of the Philippine reports was not
delayed and Central Book Supply also started to publish the complete
compilation of the Supreme Court decisions through eSCRA.

To ensure that the Supreme Court e-Library was updated, various

memorandum of agreements were made and the Supreme Court connected
with the different US National Archives to obtain decisions that were destroyed
after World War 2 and the treaties entered to by the Philippines from 19462010. These are now all digitized and published in the Supreme Court
eLibrary. To finally complete the Supreme Court eLibrary, the Presidential and
Executive Issuances from the Official Gazette were digitized. This has made the
Supreme Court eLibrary the complete, primarily legal information of the
Philippines.
The new technology brings improvement on legal research, not only
because of the accessibility, but it also enables the researches to easily connect
on disparate sources and types of information.