Law Library


Legal Research Materials and Sources: Search Strategies

Things to think about before beginning your search

The documents and videos on this page outline a variety of ways to use online sources, such as Westlaw and Lexis, to perform legal research.

  • Natural language/phrase searching
  • Terms and connectors searching
  • Field and segment searching
  • Using topic and key numbers

Each approach has advantages, and it is possible to use multiple parallel approaches to the same research task.

Phrase / Natural Language Searching