EP 524- Legal Research and AI Part One

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The Jury is Out a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm, Tim Cronin, personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm and St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth:

Welcome to another episode of The Jury is Out. I’m Erich, Vieth.

John Simon:

I’m John Simon.

Erich Vieth:

We’re here with MJ Voss. Hello.

MJ Voss:

Hi. How are you guys doing?

Erich Vieth:

You are here to talk about a number of things falling under the umbrella of legal research, and that includes ai. You’re currently a law librarian at St. Louis University School of Law.

MJ Voss:

That’s correct.

Erich Vieth:

Could you tell us about your path for how you got there?

MJ Voss:

Sure. So moved around a lot as a child, let’s start there. And so every three or four years I had to make new friends, meet new people. So I was really interested in learning just because of my change of experience constantly something new people, new location, everything. And so my interest actually continued in that sort of vein every two, three years, reinventing myself and my undergrad degree is in photography and art history. I lived in Taiwan. I came back and became a public librarian with a master’s in Library Information Science that lasted a few years. I wanted something else that was sort of a generalist type pursuit of just learning. And I picked law. I had some family members that were in the law and relatives as such, and I just decided that I’d go into that field and not sure what I wanted to do. Thought maybe with the background in library and information science, I’d go into ip, something along those lines, which I did. I studied that, but then I decided to do civil rights work, so that’s why I started Arch City Defenders and ran that for a long time.

Erich Vieth:

Tell us more about Arch City.

MJ Voss:

Yeah, so Arch City Defenders is a nonprofit holistic law firm here in St. Louis that does a combination of work for mostly the homeless or the unhoused, the owner risk of unhoused, low income people, both civil and criminal. When we started at the two existing nonprofits or agencies, if you will, that did work for the indigent in St. Louis were the puppet defender and legal services of Eastern Missouri. And each of those is siloed. One does criminal, one does civil, and there’s low funding for social workers, which is a big need in any of the people that are in that category. And so we decided to create an organization that combined both of those things and wasn’t tied to any government funding or federal funding initially. And then we started taking on cases. And so we did that work for a number of years out in the municipal courts and the trenches and criminal dockets and housing dockets representing people.

And then what we’re seeing were a lot of constitutional violations going on in these courts. And so we decided to expand the work. We’d go to court for a person, we’d go to good outcome, but then there’d be a line of about a hundred people waiting that needed a representation that getting it. And so we thought, what can you do more systemically? And so we started doing civil rights litigation, suing a lot of municipalities, including the city of St. Louis for police misconduct, running debtors prisons, using cash bail as a weapon to hold people in court, in jail. And we did that work and kind of took off right around when the Ferguson uprising happened. A lot of our services were needed, and we got involved with a lot of community organizing as well. So it’s sort of a large organization, somewhat large organization in terms of what it does. Its staff was, at first it was just three volunteer lawyers, and within 10 years it grew to a staff of over 25. And that included social workers, housing people included people that did development work, people that did communications work, and obviously lawyers that did both civil and criminal representation and community organizing. So impacted people, became staff members. And it just kind of grew from there as to this kind of a model that is unique from nonprofits that do civil rights and holistic representation. I

Erich Vieth:

Worked there with you for a couple years, and I know you wore a number of hats. Could you talk about how often you got into the Courtroom in the later years when it was a bigger civil rights litigation?

MJ Voss:

Yeah, it took a while. So I knew that Art City Defenders would’ve succeeded once I got fired, right? Once the board said, what is this guy who just with no background in running a business or a law firm, what is he doing running this organization? So I started with three, two other guys, and we did everything from the very beginning, marketing to fundraising, to grant writing, to making payroll work, making sure we had benefits, hr, all of that, and dealing with complaints about the refrigerator not working or I don’t like sharing an office with him because he eats fish, whatever, these sort of employee kind of employee employer kind of relations. And I would be in court mostly every morning and every night I’d be in court at the housing docket in the city or the county, or I’d be at the preliminary hearing docket in the county, and then I’d be in night court in any one of our 85 wonderful municipalities.

John Simon:

So how long were you there?

MJ Voss:

So I started it in 2009, right out of graduating law school. Again, naivete is sometimes a good asset. So right out of law school, we started the organization and I stayed there until 2020. And after that I worked at the equal Housing opportunity for a little while, equal Housing Opportunity Council, but then I took this assistant professorship job at St. Louis University in 2022. So I’m an assistant professor of legal research and I teach intellectual property research and advanced legal research, and I work the reference desk for the students. So

John Simon:

What were the other two that started it? How did you find them and what were their backgrounds?

MJ Voss:

So that was Thomas Harvey and John McCann. We were all students at St. Louis University all in the same year. And we had this opportunity to go to New Orleans as an alternative spring break, I think between our second and third year. And we went down there, it was not too long after Katrina, and we had this experience working with southeastern Louisiana, Lee la. And basically what we were doing, we were interviewing people looking at whether or not they could qualify for some of the flood insurance programs that the FEMA was organizing, the National Flood Insurance program. And I was trying to figure out one of the tests I had just for a week and a half down there to challenge the denials that were happening. So to get insurance down after a flood, you need to show clear title to the property or clear ownership with a recorder, deeds office, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, what do you think about the families in the Lower Ninth Ward? How frequently do they go to the recorder deeds office when a property transferred from a grandmother to a grandson or from an uncle to a nephew? No general distrust in government, let alone thinking that they need to go and register this and get it recorded. And because of that, they couldn’t show ownership, and so we couldn’t show that they clearly owned it. There might be liens on prior debt owed. And so I learned something then because with the law, we have the black letter law, the bright rules, and we also have exceptions. Those are kind of baked in over time into the law. And so although my people I was representing didn’t have the proper documentation if the proper documentation was something filed with the state, but they definitely had a lifetime of memories in those homes.

They didn’t qualify for getting assistance because they couldn’t show this one piece of paper, but they could show a photo album of decades at this home that didn’t work. And so then I kind of got this feeling and kind of thinking about it, and I started reading more about public just work and this concept that what’s just isn’t always legal and what’s legal isn’t always just right. Bill Quigley, a professor Tulane wrote a paper, and that’s kind of where I got that phrase from. And it struck me that I wanted to do more with the power that I was going to have as a lawyer, assuming it passed theBar and graduated prior to that. And I really decided that I was going to try to do something different that was going to help people. I was a public librarian before I went to law school, so I served the public and I was thinking, how can I use this tool for good? And I got together with Thomas and John, and we decided that we’d find a model out there. I was working at Legal Aid here, and Thomas was working at the public defender. And our jobs basically were triaging people out of services, underfunded organizations. And when we started seeing that this wasn’t working for the vast majority of people that needed legal services, we looked around for a model that worked, and that was the Bronx Defenders.

John Simon:

So it was Thomas and John were both law, they were just so all three of you right out of law school starting up

MJ Voss:

Right out of law school. That’s amazing. We incorporated the nonprofit, we got everything going, and then we went down to St. Patrick’s Center, just started interviewing potential clients, mostly veterans who needed warrants cleared up so they could get into housing programs. That was the first few days we could take on things that other people couldn’t take on. So we had a couple of people that outstanding debt for child support for children, long aged out of child support, but that debt was still there in owed to the state. Well, what we could do is we could help them modify that amount that’s owed in terms of debt and deal with the administrative process, but they’re also getting charged criminally. The state wanted to lock them up of the debt they owed, so we could also represent them in the criminal side too, and get a better disposition in those kind of cases. And again, the whole point of this was to help individuals really, and that experience we had doing that work for about five, six years was a lot. We grew the organization and we survived. Most businesses die within the first few years, but we kept at it. We were all working part-time when we first started. Eventually we were able to raise enough money to work and we never charged our clients anything. Still don’t. It was always through grant money or

John Simon:

Where is most of the funding? Private grants or

MJ Voss:

To this day, it’s mostly private family foundations or individual contributions, other grants mostly from foundations. We did have a contract with the city’s homeless services division through HUD money that came through. That’s a whole other conversation about how the city manages HUD money for the homeless here in St. Louis. But that was a grant that we applied for a contract. We did a reimbursement contract, and so we would clear up warrants so people could get into housing.

John Simon:

How many people did you help on any given year toward the end when

MJ Voss:

You left? When I left, I mean, if you add in the number of class members and the large class actions, we’re talking about tens of thousands of people.

John Simon:

Wow.

MJ Voss:

That was incredible. We changed the litigation. We filed scared a lot of the municipalities and got them out of the practices for the most part of using their courts as revenue streams and their police department as sort of the sheriff to bring people into that system. But we saw some reforms at the Supreme Court level in terms of how these courts worked. During that, we also had litigation with injunctive relief that stopped these towns from doing certain things using cash bail as a way to hold somebody squeezing blood from a turnip until some money was put into the system. And then that meant because there was now money in the system, that person was going from one municipality to another because somebody paid. So a lot of that was going on. So we did this systemic litigation. So yeah, tens of thousands of people with the class action work, but on a yearly basis from probably like 2016 on, we’re talking about hundreds of people, hundreds of people and families, not just the individuals. It was families. A lot of

John Simon:

People with kids. Well, that is unbelievable.

MJ Voss:

Thanks.

John Simon:

I mean, just incredible to think that it’s up and running with, what’d you say, 25 staff people now? It’s like

MJ Voss:

36 now or

John Simon:

So. Wow. Yeah.

MJ Voss:

Yeah. When I left, it was still doing great. Blake Strode, the executive director, he joined us in 2015, and he’s from St. Louis and does a great job. Jackie Langham, who you might know as well, she works.

John Simon:

You get volunteer. I guess there are some volunteer attorneys, I hope, or

MJ Voss:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean the organization’s always put on CLEs and we get volunteer attorneys, and we’ve used that. In fact, my relationship with Erich starts working at Art City, and Erich was like an independent contractor with us to do and help us move forward some of these larger civil rights cases. When you’re dealing with Suya municipality or government, as you’re well aware, you’re going to deal with insurance companies coming in with defending these towns or paying the lawyers to defend. They know how to keep you busy. They do. So brought on our expert insurance defense slash civil rights lawyer here, probably the unique position in city of St. Louis with those two skill sets. I learned a lot from him.

Erich Vieth:

So we’ve covered what a dozen of your hats already, but tell us a little more about your current course. We’ll just get the overview at this point. And I want to start with then slipping into AI because I think there would be a natural progression into ai, but talk about the research methods course. And the reason I found this interesting is I thought to myself when I research, what am I doing? I don’t know. I think it’s ad hoc. I mean, I know I have instincts. I think I need to work more on that. That’s a weak spot. Or if that’s something that scares me about the other opponent, the opponent’s argument, there’s a big hole over here. I got to package it in some sort of narrative. I got to make sure that it punches when I say to the judge, it’s got to make sense and it’s got to be accurate. I can’t be, I’m talking about half the cases and the other half I’m hoping no one will find. But there’s that stuff. It’s a big basket of push and pull and worry. And I never thought about there being a method of researching. So could you give us a synopsis if someone signs up for this course, do they think they’re signing up for

MJ Voss:

Yeah, so the main courses is advanced legal research at slu. It’s taught by the assistant professors that are law librarians. Everybody in the law library has a JD and a master’s in library science. After that first year, you take legal research and writing, right? And this is to move you beyond that. Legal research in writing is a very case specific, looking at cases, learning how to use basically Westlaw or Alexis at the beginning. But advanced legal research is kind of taking you beyond, right? Advanced legal research is trying to address some of the things that I think a lot of students that it’s an elective, so not everybody has to take it. But I think when you graduate law school, you should have a clear understanding of the difference between the US code and the code of federal regulations and how they’re organized. You should have a clear understanding of where you go to for legislative history.

If you’re looking at that, how a law is being made, whether it’s federal level or state, you need to know the process in which administrative agencies promulgate their rules and how those become law. And the course is to touch both on legislative regulatory and also obviously within the judicial branch, what’s produced in terms of the cases, rules, those sort of things. But it’s really about not just learning where things are and how to find them. It’s about figuring out how do you research in a way that develops an understanding that is consistent regardless of whatever it is that you’re trying to look at or find. It’s sort of a fundamental basic understanding of that there’s got to be not just an accurate, what I call retention or an accurate of the information, but that you’re actually systemically understanding skillset that will allow you to use that regardless of what the subject matter is.

So perhaps I’m rambling a little bit on that, but what I’m trying to say is that understanding what, and also understanding what you don’t know, both are equally important in legal research. It’s not about, as a librarian, what I’m not trying to do is to help someone find an answer. When they come to my desk, what I’m trying to help them do is figure out the right question. And those are very different. We live in a culture that’s pretty end goal consumer. Let’s get this answer now and move on. That’s great, but then we will deal with it. You have always issues of accuracy. You have always issues of efficiency, and you always have issues about proper retention. How do I repeat that? And so what I want students to do when they come to this class, have a better understanding of the universe that is the law, and also have a very clear set of, to quote Liam Neon’s set of skills, very unique set of skills that allow them to constantly produce the most effective results in the time that they’re spending to do that research. So it is more than just typing something into a search bar. It is sitting down and making a clear assessment of what and what you don’t know, and then thinking of a methodology to put in place to keep track of that whole process of doing the research and evaluating it as you go

Erich Vieth:

In the trenches, they want a case and they don’t want the context and they don’t want the stuff you don’t know and they want your best shot. Why should I do this thing? And so you’re dealing with students who have a semester to dig deep into a lot of things, but sometimes in the real world, they just want the answer.

MJ Voss:

That’s great, that’s the end result. That’s in the Courtroom, that’s the going to the partner. That’s the in class. But how do you get there? How do you know what to provide? You can have for just having that one quick answer, you should have gone through quite a lot of steps to make sure that that is an accurate answer, that you can rely on that and you can be comfortable giving that to a court. And that takes time. That takes time to figure that out.

Erich Vieth:

And when you give your answer, quite often your opponent gives another case that seems to say the opposite or doesn’t agree at least. And then that seems to be the place where you’re thinking, I wish I had dug deeper so I know why. My right answer is really right.

MJ Voss:

Yeah. So what I teach is a basic understanding of how to develop what’s a research strategy and maintain what is called a research log. So it’s not just going to Westlaw, at least you’re comfortable that that’s the world of law that you’re going into. It’s not Google and it’s not chat GPT. It is a confined universe of results that you’re going to get that are released within a field of study that you’re practicing in. But you shouldn’t just use that search bar at the beginning, right? A lot of people don’t even know the way in which Westlaw or Alexis or Bloomberg Law is organized visually where things are within it. And I use this example when students start is okay, if you think about it, you’re going into a library when you go into an actual physical library, you’re in the universe of books, you’re in the universe of information.

So you’re in a specific space, and then you know that it’s organized a certain way. Everything on a kind of topic, similar topic’s going to be in a single aisle or in a couple aisles, different area, physically where you are. So the beginning of that space and the end of that space. And then when you find the book on the shelf that you’re interested in, first you’re maybe doing some shelf reading. You’re looking from the books to left to the right of it too, that are somewhat related to it that you didn’t know about, but you find that book that you looked for and you pull it off the shelf where it starts, and physically where it stops, your brain has a very clear understanding of the universe in which you’re trying to find your answer. Now, when you go and start using a search bar, you don’t know where you’re going

John Simon:

And a lost in a C,

MJ Voss:

You’re lost in. So the other example is, so the internet is going into a library, taking every book off the shelf, going in and getting recycled materials that were old, outdated, as well as perhaps really wrong. Throwing that in there and tearing all the pages out of all the books, putting it on the floor and putting all of those irrelevant things, unnecessary unvetted things in there as well and go have at it. Does that actually help? Does that help you find the answer quicker, sooner, better? No, I think that we know that there’s a process in which information is being vetted by the publishing, by the librarians, by the organization, the cataloging of that information, and then also the authorit evaluation that’s happening all there for you when you are in the world of Westlaw. But that search bar is taking, now you’ve gone into a huge law library and you’ve done the same thing.

You don’t know where you’re going. And so there’s this rabbit hole thing of hyperlinks that just is being fed to you all the time on every page, whether it’s a hyperlink to a footnote or if it’s a hyperlink to some other treatise or secondary source or something completely irrelevant because you don’t know who created that hyperlink and why, and is it relevant for me? And so what I’m trying to do is build the ability to assess those hyperlinks for them and also understand that maybe you don’t need those, if you know how to craft your search at the beginning before you even get to that toolbar. So list what, just personally, what you know about something, right? First assignment is for them to look up toxin, which is a biosimilar, and you’ve got a potential client that wants to do something else on monoclonal antibodies to create a genErich thing, and you’re going to represent that company that’s doing this with this young person.

So now you got to know what is Rituxan, what does it do? And also need to know, okay, what are the aspects of what regulates that? What are the agencies that are relevant to that? What do I know about this and what do I know about it? And so they go really deeply into it. And so if I’m looking up stuff about medical science, where am I going to go that’s publicly available. Again, we’re not even touching Westlaw, Lexus, we’re talking about publicly available stuff. So they start with PubMed, they start with Google Scholar. They’ll start by looking at things that are out there that is again, all of the pages thrown on the ground, but they’re starting with actually having some sort of assessment of what they’re going, and they’re keeping track of that as they go. Then what terms come up? What search terms that you didn’t have down written down for this search pop up that you think might be relevant. You keep track of that, change your search strategy in terms of which coming up with this. And so you have this combination of both refining and as you refine, you’re also expanding your knowledge base about also not just what the liftable, but to ignore and what to not evaluate and not spend your time on. Because we know that efficiency is the big key to the game, but any research in the legal profession,

Erich Vieth:

I think that was my epiphany early in law school that’s paid off ever since. I thought if I can figure out what’s not important and get it out of the way, I’ll be much better off. And so that was my first foray into anything. It’s like get the stuff out of the way that’s just going to dilute it. It’s like cholesterol clogging up your circulatory system. You got to just get it out of there. And so you’re looking at stuff that matters. Sometimes you get it out of there and there’s not much left. You go, well, I need to get more stuff.

John Simon:

The thing that hit home for me, what I do day to day, rarely do I do research. It would be dangerous and probably malpractice for me to do research. I read a ton of briefs. I read all the briefs that we file. I read the cases when we’re getting ready to argue. And to me it’s always about, it’s not the answer to a question, but it’s our path forward. And when I see research from one of the younger lawyers or even the law clerks where the issue is, does this evidence come in whether we want it to come in or we don’t want it to come in the issue. Well, it’s yes or no, or can we pursue this theory? No, we can’t. When I get an analysis, like you were saying, what’s the strategy? The question is we we’re at point A, we want to get to point B. And maybe the path I’m thinking about that gets us there doesn’t get us there. But to be able to think, but what does get us there

And what’s the position of the defendant in the case if their expert says a, maybe the thing comes in, the theory of recovery is a big one too, where we’re looking at whether a piece of evidence comes in. Well, what theory, right? What theory are we talking about? It comes in for punitives, but it doesn’t come in for this. And so to me, it’s always the best research that I see. I will a lot of times not even be thinking about what the path we end up taking is one I didn’t even think about. I’ll be sitting with a couple of the younger lawyers and be saying, okay, and I always say, there’s this case that I remember from before and this and that. And most of the time, well, you’re right, we can’t get there this way, but we’ve got six other paths to get there.

And maybe it’s based factually on what we can develop or testimony that we can develop. And I guess that includes the answer. The answer. It’s never a question. It’s an answer to a problem. Here’s what we want to do and how do we get there? We had a case over in Illinois where we had a great punitive case with punitive conduct, but there was also a medical mal component to it, and Illinois doesn’t have punitives on that. And so that was multilayered in terms we were able to do it successfully, but we spent incredible amount of time and there was some really good creative things that were found. It’s thinking, it’s really, like you were saying before, thinking about it, before you start looking and looking at the logic tree of, okay, we’re here. What about this? What about that?

MJ Voss:

And that’s a big part of it too. So when I asked them to begin that first assignment, which isn’t in law at all, but I want them to think about analogous things in their own life that they’ve experienced, right? About something that is similar but not completely similar. And what words did you use for that? Or what context was that in? What’s analogous to what you’re doing here? Right? So it’s not just like, I don’t know anything about monoclonal antibodies. Okay, now you’ve learned a few things through looking at PubMed. What else are you learning here in terms of how different does this have to be in terms of to be a genErich, this invention that this person has versus it not being So their own experience in terms of do I take genErich medicine? Who are the companies that bone manufacturer questions that aren’t relevant to the question I’m asking necessarily, but they help build their world of understanding, which can create sort of good connections in their synapses and in reality that aren’t there at the beginning when they confine themselves just to say, here’s the question presented.

Okay, well, what other questions might come from that? What other questions aren’t even maybe present now, but will be later that that you’ll develop? So if you can start thinking broadly, like I said, you refine your search, but you broaden your understanding of this, then you can create these analogies that might not be there in the law correctly now, but because of your experience, John practicing so many years, you’ve seen this and you can bring your own personal experience to this, especially for a young lawyer who doesn’t know, doesn’t have the life experience that you’ve had litigating these cases in different jurisdictions. But so I had a student that came in and was working on a note for the journal. It was a note basically looking at how these online platforms like Amazon, when they deal with an infringement action, a patent or trademark infringement case that’s brought to them, someone’s complaining. One seller is complaining about another seller on your platform selling something that conflicts with my patent. What they have is a non-judicial process for people to deal with these complaints within Amazon itself or within whatever other resource, whether they’re online source or database. There is, or I mean online seller that it is

Erich Vieth:

Binding arbitration. So

MJ Voss:

That’s exactly right. So the student didn’t know about, well, what’s this? Well, I said, it looks like this is an arbitration issue. Are these sellers signing up for this method of dispute outside of the court system and what are the problems with that? So why don’t you start looking at arbitration? And she’s like, I don’t know anything about that. I’m like, have you ever bought a plane ticket?

John Simon:

Good arbitration clause?

MJ Voss:

Yeah,

John Simon:

Everything has an arbitration clause in it.

MJ Voss:

So all of these things. So now that expanded her understanding to look at it not just within the IP context, like the intellectual property infringement context where she’s thinking of the patent and trademark review board. She’s looking at thinking about it those ways. I’m like, well, in the commercial world, this is basically, did they sign up for this contract that says that they have to do this now she needs to look at the pros and cons of this. Is it we want judicial efficiency? So that’s why the courts historically going back didn’t favor arbitration. They wanted this stuff, but because of the over number of cases and dockets, et cetera, the courts have been more lenient over time for this. So how does that history of arbitration within the United States and the tendency to go that direction in business, how does that match up with what you’re seeing now with this new forum? Is it going to have the same rigor in terms of openness and transparency as our cart system, right? No, maybe not. Arbitration technically doesn’t, right? So how do you understand it differently? So my own experience and then sharing that with her expanded her understanding how to write this note and what she was going to research. So her slant became not necessarily just from the IP way of looking at it, but looking at it from general business arbitration clause,

Erich Vieth:

What you just said makes me think that you’re exploring your own personal experiences. And this is really important that when you’re up there talking to a judge, they don’t usually say, just give me the case. And then that’s it. Usually there is a discussion and then what often happens, you’re using your, I don’t know how to even describe the human process by which we try to persuade another human being by maybe relating to other experiences. Judge, have you ever bought a plane ticket or metaphorical techniques for saying it’s like this? Because law is like error. A lot of times it’s like error. You’re trying to grab onto something and you need to resort to

John Simon:

The metaphors reason I’m smiling over here is last Thursday we were in court on motions in St. Louis County and one of the motions involved whether we needed to turn over a document that a non retained expert had had, and we didn’t disclose ’em. And we had a case that where somebody actually disclosed an expert and withdrew ’em.

And the court said, no, you don’t get that. They’re withdrawn here. We didn’t even disclosed them. They were just a consulting expert. And again, the first thing the judge said was, do you have a case on that? And their answer was, well, we have a case that’s not the same, but it’s even stronger that we didn’t even disclose. But anyway, we ended that hearing with the judge saying, find me a case, a case on it and send it. Well, of course they’ve got 40 motions a day that they need to hear. They don’t have three hours to go research. Again, the

MJ Voss:

Judicial efficiency aspect,

John Simon:

Judicial efficiency.

MJ Voss:

And one of the things though is what I’m trying to do is to have the students step out of the process that they’re going through, what you’re going through, and just think about it, right? To just slow down a little bit, think about what my answers are, right? Don’t think about the deadlines, don’t think about who’s asking you for this information. The more you can step out of yourself a little bit and see what you’re doing and have a better understanding of that, the clear, and I think the development of expertise starts, right? It’s not just knowing something, but knowing how, why and what about it and why this is necessary. So it’s literally just trying to slow them down a little bit, which I think today’s age is even harder than it was in mine because of the 24 7 news cycle as well as all the social media, everything like that. So what I’m trying to do is change their way of thinking a little bit, just a little bit so that they have a better and clear understanding. Because what I want them to know isn’t necessarily any of the right answers in my questions. I have no right answer. What I need to see is your path.

John Simon:

What

MJ Voss:

I need to see is where you started and how you get there. And if I can replicate that, then you pass my class.

Erich Vieth:

I was thinking more about this. Give me the case. How often is it that you’re against a good attorney and the judge says, give me a case. And then that attorney goes, ah, you beat me. You win. No, they always have something to say. They always do. So you always have to go to the next way. We

John Simon:

Had one. I have, and again, it’s from experience and getting in jams and you figure out, okay, I am going to need this or that. But when I do voir dire in cases, my last two pages of any voir dire outline are the key Missouri cases on the points that always come up when I ask a question, it’s objected to, and whether it’s a statute or the cases, I have the top 10 or 15 cases all laid out. And there was an out of town attorney in the last one who said, well, your Honor, because they read a couple of my former older voir dires, we just want to put on the record, we want to object to this and this and that situation I had, and I know the case names and I can just cite it and look at it. But that’s so narrow. It’s a little easier. But one of the other things too is think about researching after a verdict versus before the evidence, or in other words, before the facts or all the evidence is really developed in the case when you’re formulating the theories and figuring out which way to go, it’s almost endless When you’re researching, you have a record,

In other words, researching when you know what the facts are versus researching when you have no idea what they’re going to be.

Because you may want to pursue a certain claim, but that may hurt you on another claim. We deal with the same types of cases a lot, and when issues come up 99 times out of a hundred, there are issues that the law may have changed a little bit or there may be some new case. But the whole idea of, like you said, sitting down and figuring out the path, it’s a lot easier for me because it’s the same if it’s a product liability case, I’ve handled a whole bunch of ’em, right? But it just seems to me that it’s a lot more focused, especially not being the appellant, but the Apple e respondent, whatever it is, because you’re responding to specific, the arguments are framed, right? Right.

MJ Voss:

I mean that’s part of it too. For the young law students, they want to get a job. And so it’s like what I’m trying to do is get it so that you keep a research log. Why do you need to make sure that every time you put down a new term, it’s located within? I usually use Excel sheet for them, and I want you to put the date first and then I want what issue it is that you’re looking for on this date. And so then I want you to identify what resource and resource and source are different from me. Resources is the tool that you use and source is what ultimately you’re going to cite or rely on for your arguments. So the precedent that’s out there or the primary law, or if it’s going to be something that’s a little bit more like in an academic world, what journal are you citing?

What treatise are you relying on? So understand the resource that you’re looking in. What are your search terms, what was coming up, what wasn’t coming up? And this includes also looking at governmental websites. It includes looking at the FDA’s is including looking at governmental ones as well as NGO O ones. So we do a lot, we teach a little bit of international legal research as well. And so they’re looking at the WTO and other things. So you knew what you searched and what database and what results you got. You still have to evaluate those results, right, relative to your fact pattern, et cetera. But you can start to rank that perhaps. But so you keep track of this, so not only have you clearly known what you’ve just spent the last four hours doing, you have a record of it. You also have created a pathway for someone else because a young associate

John Simon:

To pick up where

MJ Voss:

You left off to pick up where you left off and someone doesn’t have lawyers, don’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. We just figure out different ways of putting old wheels together to make a new one for us. And so that is what you’re doing here. Someone’s going to take this over. Not only that, okay, you want to be partner someday. If you constantly have doing research for your senior associate or your partner that you’re working for and you’ve kept a log of all that and all of that is now work product and it’s in the folder and they can see the time, not just a memo at the end, here are the different things that I’ve done and how I find this information and here’s the questions that still don’t have answers to all that in there. And you’ve now created this work product for the firm that goes in that file and can be used as a resource,

John Simon:

Especially doing what we do. We don’t bill by the hour efficiencies make or break us. There was a young lawyer here years, like 25 years ago that worked with me, absolutely brilliant. And he wouldn’t document anything. He would, it’s all up here. Yeah, I know exactly. And one of the things, I walked in his office and he had just worked out the objections to discovery and it was a real lengthy process and he got ’em all worked out with the other lawyer, and of course he’s practicing in his first year, and I said, you need to do a letter, an internal memo letter confirming exactly what was reviewed. He goes, oh, I’ll remember it. I was like, I go, well, first of all, I won’t. And I said, but the other thing is I can guarantee you, you all didn’t agree what you think you agreed to ain’t what they think, but it was the same thing. It was like, and of course he did, and there were a half a dozen things that we had a little misunderstanding about and had to take some of ’em up.

MJ Voss:

But

John Simon:

That is, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel anywhere much less if you’re doing contingency work efficiencies or what I tell the lawyers here, we had an attorney meeting and I put down five basic rules to assist with what we do. The kind of practice we have in one of them was avoid the unnecessary and redoing the same thing over again. Not a good idea.

MJ Voss:

No, no. And that’s why I have them step out of just the task.

John Simon:

How many students take it out of the class?

MJ Voss:

So it’s limited to 15 a semester. I sometimes up to 18 if there’s some wait list students to put in. I have had students that have graduated that, and I’ve only been teaching there for two years, but they’ve graduated. Like I learned so much in this class. It’s so much. It relates so much to actual practice. To me, obviously that trying to law is extremely important to know and understand and how to think like a lawyer that legal research and writing starts you on, but to actually know what’s out there when you practice, like I said at the very beginning, the difference between the US code, how it’s organized by subject versus let’s say then what’s prior to that, the statutes at large, which are organized chronologically. And then before that the public law, which is all the same thing, but it’s different ways of organizing this information and how can you find it now. Just knowing that simple thing is important because again, this exists, this way of temporal organization, subject organization, as well as it’s coming out like a register. What are we looking at applies throughout almost every other area in which the government is creating documentation for you to rely on.

Erich Vieth:

We’re going to pause our conversation at this point. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for agreeing to stick around for another conversation on these topics of legal research along with ai. This has been another episode of The Jury is Out. I’m Erich Thief.

John Simon:

I’m John Simon. We’ll see you next time.

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