- TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- 1. Overriding Principle: Preserve Value
- 2. Put Everything Into a DOCX Document
- 3. Use a Memo Format
- 4. The Memo Should Be Self-Contained
- 5. When Listing Sources, Please Use Bluebook Format and Give Whatever Information is Necessary or Helpful to Locate the Source
- 6. Share Your Sources and Methods
- 7. Please Don’t Self-Censor Opinions, Concerns, Etc.
- 8. General Matters of Style, Including Outline Format, Bulleted Lists, Etc.
- 9. Lacking Concision Can Be Okay
- 10. Delivering Multiple Files – When Everything Can’t or Shouldn’t Be Put Into One Document
- 11. Please Use Explanatory File Names
This memo explains for law student research assistants how to write up, format, and package the fruits of a research request. In other words, this memo seeks to answer the question: Given a research request, what should the deliverable look like?
I’ve written this memo based on what will be helpful to me, but I don’t think anything here is idiosyncratic. I imagine that most of this is good general advice. (And if this is helpful to other scholars and researchers – that’s great. Consider dropping me a line and letting me know.)
1. Overriding Principle: Preserve Value
When a student or anyone engages in a research project, it is a substantial investment of time and effort. Thus, it is important that the deliverable should be structured so as to preserve the value of the time and effort expended. As you are packaging and writing up your research results, please use that general principle to guide you. Most of the remainder of this memo is specific guidelines that follow from that general principle. But please keep the general principle in mind – it should help you navigate a multitude of concerns.
2. Put Everything Into a DOCX Document
Please put everything, so far as it is possible, into a single DOCX document.
Sometimes research assistants are inclined to split up information between an email message and an attached document. This is less helpful than a single document, because if there’s information in both an email and an attachment, that means that on my end I must work out a way to preserve the information from both places – such as by creating a new, single document into which I put everything. It is far more preferable that you deliver the information all in one document to begin with. Consider that if your email says anything other than, “Please see the attached document regarding research you requested,” then you are probably saying something that should be in the attached document itself. (For situations that necessitate multiple files, see §§ 10 & 11, below.)
An editable format like DOCX is a better way to provide the fruits of your research than a PDF, because the DOCX file lends itself better to the reusing and remixing of the text within it – and that helps for using your research as an input in the production of an article, book, etc.
3. Use a Memo Format
The DOCX document should be in a memo format.
If the word “memo” causes sudden, painful flashbacks to your first-year legal writing course, then please relax. I’m not talking about that. I don’t know what all was required of the legal research memo you wrote then, but I wouldn’t consider that your starting point. Putting your research product in the form of a memo shouldn’t be onerous.
What I care about is functionality – that the document explains itself as to what it is and that it preserves the value of your work. Thus, the document should have your name on it. It should have a date on it. And it should have a title or “re” line explaining what it is. This is exactly what’s so nice about the memo format: It forces you to be clear about the to, from, date, and subject.
And please make sure your memo has page numbers! (And as you go forward in your professional life, I urge you to get in the habit of always using page numbers.)
Beyond those key functional things, your memo can and should be written in an informal tone – as you would use in an email to a professor.
4. The Memo Should Be Self-Contained
The memo should be self-contained, so that whoever picks up the memo doesn’t need to locate and scrutinize other documents to find out what the memo is talking about. This maximizes and best preserves the value of the research you’ve done.
So, for instance, instead of
This memo provides is a list of cases that fit the criteria of your September 28, 2023 email.
it is better for you to say
This memo provides a list of cases from the Alaska Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986 discussing liability of helicopter pilots for damage to spruce trees, as requested in your September 28, 2023 email.
If it’s efficient and helpfully information-preserving to just cut and paste from the research request, please go ahead.
A long time ago, a person told me that they were taught not to use the words “you” or “I” in a legal memo. Huh!?! All I can say is that I completely disagree with that. The words “you” and “I” are wonderful words in a memo because they are clear. In fact, often the best word to start a legal research memo is “you.” Consider these opening lines:
You asked in an email of September 28, 2023 for a list of all cases from the Alaska Supreme Court from 1970 to 1986 discussing liability of helicopter pilots for damage to spruce trees. I composed a list of these cases by running a series of queries on Westlaw.
Those are great opening lines for a memo! They are so clear!
5. When Listing Sources, Please Use Bluebook Format and Give Whatever Information is Necessary or Helpful to Locate the Source
If part of your research deliverable is indicating one or more sources (and it probably is), then it is generally helpful if you use Bluebook format when referring to them.
You should virtually always be using Bluebook format for judicial opinions, law review articles, and statutes. And you should probably be able to pull off Bluebook style for straightforward news sources and internet sources. For other sources, please use Bluebook format when it is reasonable to do so (see the next paragraph). The Bluebook format used should be the flavor that has the typeface used for law review footnotes (e.g., italics and small caps; no underlining). Your doing this will greatly help me in using the fruits of your research in the article or other final product I’m working on.
There are some important caveats/provisos when it comes to Bluebook format. First, be reasonable as to what Bluebook rules we’re talking about here. The Bluebook has a lot of rarely used rules for exotic documents, and sometimes the Bluebook is unclear as to those rules. So if it’s going to take a half hour to figure out how to Bluebook a single source, and it’s not even an important source that’s at the core of the research request, then maybe you should take your best guess – noting that it’s a guess – and move on. For instance, suppose you came across a committee report on proposed legislation of European Coal and Steel Community, and while I didn’t ask for that in particular, you thought it might be of peripheral interest to me. There’s no need to make a martyr of yourself trying to figure out how to perfectly Bluebook that.
Second, even if you’re dealing with normal sources like cases or law review articles, if Bluebooking them all would substantially increase the hours you’re spending on the project, then maybe you should let the Bluebooking slide. For instance, if you were putting together a list of many dozens or even hundreds of cases that met some criteria, and if Westlaw or Lexis was giving you citations that are close to Bluebook style but not exactly perfect, then probably whatever the database is giving you is good enough. It will depend on the project and the likelihood that any given citation is being ported straight to a law review footnote. Either way, if you make a note of what you’re doing, that will be useful.
Third, be careful about losing information when putting things into Bluebook style. One of the many ridiculous things about Bluebook citation is that it can create ambiguity and obfuscate sources. For instance, abbreviated names of periodicals from outside the legal field can make for real headscratchers. The abbreviation “TECH. EMP.” for a journal – what would that be? Well, it could be a journal named TECHNICAL EMPLOYEE, TECHNOLOGICAL EMPLOYMENT, or THE TECHNIQUE OF THE EMPLOYER. They’d all be abbreviated the same way! And since that’s not my area, I wouldn’t have a clue as to the name of the journal from looking at “TECH. EMP.” Worse, if all three are real journals, there would be no way for anyone to know which one is indicated except through trial and error. So if a source, once Bluebooked, seems like it might plausibly be mystifying or inscrutable to a regular law professor off the street, then please consider adding something in brackets that illuminates the issue.
As a final note, please be liberal about including URLs (internet links), even if the Bluebook doesn’t advise you to include them. So if you find something – even if it’s a treaty, newspaper article, law review article, etc. – somewhere on the internet, please provide the URL. That will make it easy for me to find it.
6. Share Your Sources and Methods
Please say whatever you reasonably can about how you did your research. If, for instance, you did all of your research on Lexis and didn’t use Westlaw, please say that. That helps maximize the value of your work, because if curiosity drives me to want to dig more, then I will know where you’ve already been. If you did research by running database queries, then it might be helpful for you to say something about that. But be reasonable. If you were trying lots of different queries to find one that works, there’s probably no need list everything you tried. Yet if there was one particular query you ran that produced a lot of results and you then spent considerable time sifting through the results of that query, then you would definitely want to preserve that information in the memo. Or if you happened upon a way of formulating a query that was particularly fruitful or efficient, then consider preserving that bit of knowhow in your memo as well.
By the way, don’t be anxious that it somehow might reflect poorly on you to reveal the places you have and haven’t looked (e.g., Lexis but not Westlaw, state cases but not federal). All research projects have to draw the line somewhere. In fact, one of the trickiest bits about research is knowing when to call it quits. There’s generally some marginal potential benefit to be gained from running yet one more search query or looking in yet one more database. But that doesn’t mean it’s worth it. There’s always got to be a stopping point. Just consider that if you are transparent in your memo about where you looked and where you didn’t, that will help maximize the value of your work. That is because marking your path – including dead ends – ensures someone won’t needlessly retread that same ground in the future.
7. Please Don’t Self-Censor Opinions, Concerns, Etc.
If you have opinions, please share them! So, for instance, if you find and review a bunch of newspaper articles on a certain topic, but there were a few that you found particularly helpful or compelling, then for goodness’ sake say that.
For instance, the following would be very welcome:
The following are cases discussing insurance coverage for meteor damage. I thought Ulen v. Nashlanta Mutual was particularly entertaining, as it involved the insurance company trying to argue that a meteor impact should fall under the policy’s exclusion for “flood damage” based on the idea that a meteor is equivalent to a “rock flood from space.” The judge didn’t buy the argument, but she did seem to get a laugh out of it.
This, too, would be very kind:
While you asked for cases about meteors, you might consider looking into cases about volcanos. While I didn’t look closely at the volcano cases, I did notice there are many more cases on volcano damage than meteor damage, and I think the volcano cases might be interesting to you for the same reasons as meteor cases.
Again, the point is that in putting together your deliverable you should try to preserve as much value as you reasonably can from the time and effort you’ve expended. That often will mean sharing your opinions.
8. General Matters of Style, Including Outline Format, Bulleted Lists, Etc.
Form should, of course, be dictated by the needs of the substance. That’s fine in theory – but what does that mean in practice? As a general practical matter, it will likely be best for you to write the memo in full sentences and regular paragraphs. Keep it simple. And use headings as often as you find helpful. If you make good use of your word-processing application’s styles, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, etc., you’ll find that you can auto-generate a nice table of contents – very useful if your document gets long.
Use 12-point font. Don’t get smaller than that. (As with page numbers, this is also advice to keep in mind as you go forward in your professional life.)
Bulleted lists or numbered lists sometimes have a useful role to play, but please do not structure your entire memo as a bulleted or numbered list. Also, please do not structure the memo as an outline. In my experience, I have found that list and outline formats can often be well-adapted for a document that one writes to one’s self (such as a study outline). But when used to communicate information to someone else, list and outline formats often end up being problematic. The key problem is that outline and list formats are constraining. As a result, form tends to steer substance. And that’s bad. I’ve found that when a writer is committed to an outline or list format, the writer may go about skipping useful information, inserting needless information, and obscuring information – all in the pursuit of adhering to the format.
9. Lacking Concision Can Be Okay
In most writing, there’s a premium on being concise. But in a research memo, it might make sense to include very long blockquotes from lots of sources. That could be fine. A research memo is isn’t a refined product itself; it’s a raw input for the making of some refined written product further down the line. So if a loose list of verbose quoted passages is useful in preserving the value of your research effort, don’t avoid including them simply out of a perceived obligation to avoid burdening the reader.
10. Delivering Multiple Files – When Everything Can’t or Shouldn’t Be Put Into One Document
As mentioned above, the ideal is to deliver all of the fruits of your research in one DOCX document. Yet that often is not feasible or sensible. For instance, if part of the research product is a handwritten mark-up of a document, then that will have to be a PDF. And if part of the research product is a set of downloaded articles or cases (which would be pretty standard), then those should be separate files. But your listing of additional files or provided articles should be within the single DOCX memo document that contains your general write-up.
11. Please Use Explanatory File Names
The file or files you deliver should have straightforward names that are helpful and explanatory from the recipient’s perspective. For the memo, try to include something of the topic and date. For instance, “Johnson research request.docx” is not a very helpful name from my perspective. But “Memo re meteor liability research 2022-Jan-20.docx” would be a very helpful name. For an article provided as a separate file, “Article 1.docx” is not very helpful, but “Smith, In Defense of Estoppel 17 Az. L. Rev. 111 (1988).docx” would be a great file name.
Thank you!
– EEJ