Case Laws Qualitative & Quantitative Research Analysis

INTRODUCTION:
The ability to conduct legal research is essential for lawyers, regardless of area or type of practice. The most basic step in legal research is to find the leading case governing the issues in question. As most researchers know, this is far more difficult than it sounds. The key to success in researching legal issues is realising that research is a process where the objective of the research should be known. You cannot memorise a million cases, and you are not looking for a needle in a haystack. But you can master the overall process of research. As a lawyer, you need to base your analysis on the law: judicial opinions, statutes and constitutions, and administrative law.

Researching legal concepts, case law, judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, and other information are important skills. Professionals must master research techniques and learn how to locate and synthesise legal authority.

You must be proficient at statutory interpretation and learn proper legal citation. Become proficient with legal research software applications and internet research.

Every law student and practising attorney must be able to find, read, analyse, and interpret case law. Under the common law principles of stare decisive, a court must follow the decisions in previous cases on the same legal topic. Therefore, finding cases is essential to finding out what the law is on a particular issue.

OBJECTIVE OF THE COURSE:

The main objective of this course is to get law students aware of various fixed data points in judgements. These data points are  always useful for any research analysis that can pivot around the judgement or the conclusion of any case. This course with an extended version of the data points covered in workshop being the most advance course brings for the student all  the necessary parameters that a law student will crave to learn. This course aim to make a law student understand the basic concept  of a research worth and the basic data points that are associated with each case laws / judgements.

CASE LAW RESEARCH & QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
This is the elementary level of research course on case laws. The eligible students are those who have successfully cleared the 7 days online case law workshop. The elementary level of the research programs is an elaborated version of the workshop. Any research project that is carried on on a given sample data that can be provided or readily available as raw data or it can be acquired from various surveys. In the existing case law research course, the case laws are allocated to every student for the purpose of research. 

This course covers a deeper analysis and a student to understand the basics of quantitative analysis related with the Case Laws. Two most important data points are introduced in this course which is most important for any analysis of the Case Laws. These two data points relates the case laws with law statutes ( Acts and sections applied to case law) and the other judgements referred in the  existing case laws. The student also have to generate the research project reports on 5 data points with bare acts applied and judgement category as mandatory. Student can select any 3 more data points to submit the complete research project reports.

Case law research and quantitative analysis is the basic level courses offered by Lawhub. This course offers allocation of fixed data points that available in each judgement with head note writing and also writing legal articles. This course is mainly designed for the students whose main focus is on the judgement reading and analysing.

CASE LAW RESEARCH & QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

Qualitative analysis is the analysis of qualitative data such as text data from interview transcripts. Unlike quantitative analysis, which is statistics driven and largely independent of the researcher, qualitative analysis is heavily dependent on the researcher’s analytic and integrative skills and personal knowledge of the social context where the data is collected. The emphasis in qualitative analysis is “sense making” or understanding a phenomenon, rather than predicting or explaining. A creative and investigative mindset is needed for qualitative analysis, based on an ethically enlightened and participant-in-context attitude, and a set of analytic strategies. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these qualitative analysis strategies. Interested readers are referred to more authoritative and detailed references such as Miles and Huberman’s (1984) [17] seminal book on this topic.

COURSE SUMMARY

SYLLABUS FOR LIST OF RESEARCH WORK

1. PROOF READING : Any research project is based on raw data or based on some sample data. The sample data to be researched is case laws. Staying focused and patience is the key of any researched project. The proof reading of case laws is the patience test and also to stay focused on what you read. Proof reading involves a focused reading of the case laws and formats it with well defined formats and highlighting important research points. This proof reading is the first part of the case law research project can be stereotype or monotonous. Proper data validation and organising a sample data lays down a stepping stone for advancement of the research journey. It’s more like anything that starts in an organised way has all the chances to end with a motive that is met. Organising the research data for research is an important research criteria also setting up a path for successful and authentic research project.

"The case laws provided will have some junk data (intentionally provided) so that law student read the complete case law  and remove the junk data that is not a part of the case law. Student are suggested to give focused time on each allocated case laws and format it with bullet text, paragraph and highlighting of the important point. Research is searh and re-search, so proof reading is for repeated reading that enables law students to understand and format the content of research."

 

Key for research on data is getting the data in a structured format. Proof reading and formatting is one of the research phase, for research work to start. This meets the research constraints of validating and formatting the data as first stage of structuring and also validating the data. After this the research data points should be generated and stored in an structured fomat, for effective research work on case laws.

2. FIXED DATA POINTS (FDP): These are the fixed data points are available in each case laws. The fixed data points have to be submitted in the allocated field provided individual fixed data points. Weight age marks for each data point in the case law are as per Table 04 For marking the various fixed data point are grouped based on the time spent in and understanding the data points available is case laws. 400 Case laws are allocated to each student to generate the fixed data point for all the 400 case laws allocated to each student for research

Generating various FDP from the judgements text and storing in a pre defined attributes. These FDP are the research elements of the case law. By storing these FDP the unstructured case is generated into a structured format and each of the FDP is the area of research for the law student.

Following are the Fixed data points that are to be generated after previewing the full judgement text. FDP can be single value or multiple value. Each Of the data points is briefly described.

1. Judgement Title: As provided in the case
2. Judgement Date: Date on which the judgement are reported
3. Case Number: The number of the case as provided in the judgement
4. Court Name: To be selected from the pre-defined list of courts.
5. Court Bench Name: (If applicable) this is applicable only in case of high courts, as some states have high bench available in different cities of the state. The bench is to be selected from the list of bench available for a relevant court of the state. 
6. Jurisdiction of the Court: To Selected from the predefined jurisdiction list, this is based on the case and student studies the case laws in dept to decide which jurisdiction type of the court does the existing case law can be categorised.
7. Judge's Name/s: Name of the Judges 
8. Judges Bench: A predefined list of judgement Bench is provided, student has to select the relevant data from the list available.  Click here to read more about Bench
9. Advocates Name: As provided in the case for both the parties.
10. Citation: As provided in the case
11. Cases referred: As provided in the case
12. Judgement Category: As per the subject matter of the case
13. Acts & Sections Refered : Various Acts and sections applied to the case law. List of bare acts is provided for student to select.
14. Judgement sub Category: As per the subject matter of the case
15. Disposition: As per the decision of the case. A predefined list is available and based on the conclusion of the judgement, relevant value of disposition to be selected from the list available.

iii) Research Project Report- After completing 400 judgements students have to write project report and submit on the given date.  

COURSE SUMMARY:

• Judgements delivered from various High courts and Supreme Court of India is provided for the research under this course to each student. These judgements will be random, so that at inception level a student can explore judgements from various acts.
• List of all the Indian bare acts are also provided for previewing. Since Act and section imposed is the fulcrum of the judgements, the list of various act with sections are provided to each students doing research on judgement.
• Analysing judgements delivered by various High Court and Supreme Court of India.
• Students generates the relevant data points explored after reading the full texts judgements provided to each students. These predefined data points to be stored in the relevant field as available in this online software for storing various data points
• A user-friendly web based interface is designed for each student to generate the various pre defined legal data points of judgement.
• The interface also provides  features to generate custom data point by each research that enable them to have a detail research analysis of judgements.
• Writing Legal Articles

BENEFITS OF THE COURSE:

• On successful completion of the Course the students receives a completion certificate with grades from Lawhub
• It makes a student aware of various case and get them habitual to read the judgements and research on cases.
• Makes a student capable of providing legal research assistance to lawyers in a law firm or as an assistant to senior lawyers looking for research students.
• Once a student is a legal researcher that is often termed as paralegal or legal assistant who is capable of examining a legal history and precedent, often to
  provide pertinent background information on a case to a lawyer or law firm.
• Aware of the basic quantitative analysis, can assist a senior researcher working with law data science or any AI (Artificial Intelligence) related projects.
• Student can become a legal bloggers on various blogging website, this can enable a student to establish and identity as a legal blogger on various legal and news website
• Opens avenue for the student to get jobs or as a contract worker for various law journals for writing head notes.
• Open up an avenue for getting prestigious jobs in corporate as Legal Advisers or Legal Consultants as well as Legal Executive. 

Preview Following Notes for the course

1. Proof Reading
2. Bare Act Categorisation
3. Head Note 
4. Article Writing
5. Fixed Data Points