Exploratory Research is a highly variable Stage, depending on your level of expertise.
Novice researchers often mistakenly skip exploratory research and go straight to in-depth searching, which leaves them without important context for navigating primary sources of law.
In this Stage:
Even an experienced lawyer may need to conduct some exploratory research if they are dealing with an area of law that they don't deal with on a daily basis.
Reflect on the following:
One goal of exploratory research is to develop a list of preliminary keywords for searching.
Use the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary categories to brainstorm keywords.
Depending on your level of knowledge, you will likely not have keywords for each category at this stage in your research. These are preliminary keywords; they are meant to help you locate introductory resources where you will find more terms and phrases to add to your list. Revisit this list often to refine and revise your keywords as you learn more about the topic.
►See "Extracting Keywords" in Christa Bracci & Erica Friesen, Legal Research Online (eCampus Ontario Open Library, 2024) for more information.
Next, use your preliminary keywords to locate introductory secondary sources like legal encyclopedias, textbooks, and treatises. These resources lay out the basic principles of an area of law and highlight relevant legislation and leading case law.
Primary keywords are especially useful for identifying introductory sources because it is often not possible to search across the entire text of the source. For example, if you are researching automatism, you will want to use the primary keywords criminal law and criminal defences instead of the secondary keyword automatism. Once you've identified a resource that covers that area of law, you can then search or scan for your secondary and tertiary keywords.
►See our chapter on Secondary Sources to learn how to find specific types of sources.
The introductory resources you've now located are especially useful for citation tracing. The experts who write these resources have already identified the leading case law and applicable legislation for you—all you have to do is follow those citations.
This is much more efficient than conducting your own searches across the millions of documents in Westlaw, Lexis, or CanLII. You can then use these citations as a jumping off point into more in-depth research, depending on which source type(s) they have pointed you towards.
At this point you may also find it helpful to consult a Law Librarian, who can guide you towards relevant databases, resources, and search strategies for your topic.
