Early in the process you should determine your audience. Are you writing for an attorney, a clinic, academia or for a member of the general public who many not know the jargon? The information you gather, as well as the organization and format of your Pathfinder, will vary greatly depending on your audience. For instance, a Pathfinder on surrogacy written for a family law attorney would be considerably different than one written for people interested in finding a surrogate mother.
Write a short essay, setting out the purpose, audience and subject matter of your Pathfinder. This will help you to have a clearer idea of what kind of information will be relevant when you begin your research. The essay can also be used as a basis for the introduction to the final version of your pathfinder.
As you are doing the research, keep track of the research steps you've taken to find your information so that you don't forget how you've found things. Include in your Pathfinder index terms that work for each research tool, examples of good online searches, terms that work best in periodical indexes, Lexis and Westlaw. Even useful Google searches. Make it easy for a future user to find new information on the same subject by marking the research path.
Evaluate both the resources you used to find information and the information itself. If Lexis covers a subject more thoroughly than Westlaw, let your audience know. If a particular interest group has lots more information available than all the others do, tell us about it. Make sure you check out the web sites that deal with your topic as well as the web versions of traditional legal information, like cases, law, and regulations. Evaluate all web sites for accuracy, authority, and currency. Use the web, but be cautious. It is not always a reliable source of information. Search engines like Google can lull you into thinking you have found everything, when in fact you have only found isolated pockets of disconnected information.
There will be times when it is difficult to enjoy the research process. Research can be tedious, but it can also be stimulating and satisfying. You learn a great deal about the structure and application of law from finding and evaluating legal information. You also will find that in looking for one item you may end up finding a lot more books or articles that are much better or more interesting than the one you were originally seeking. If you keep a log of your research you will be able to see how far you've come in understanding an area of law simply by looking at the progress of your research. Once you've struggled with a large looseleaf service or spent hours on the phone trying to extract information from a government agency, no big-time partner or law office autocrat will be able to intimidate you. You'll emerge from the trenches in one piece, possessing new knowledge of how to find the law.
We do not usually need to see every case, statute, and relevant article. Instead, use your powers of subjective judgment. Scan available materials and choose those that are most important or useful for fulfilling the goal of your pathfinder. Remember that this is a research guide. If, for example, you list the subject heading and key word searches that work best in LegalTrac, there is no need to include all the articles you found there. Anyone can recreate your search. Just list the articles you think are the best ones.
Information comes in many forms. If you find something that isn't in a law book, so much the better. Anyone can find something that's neatly packaged. It takes a Commando Legal Researcher to track down sources that are out of the mainstream of legal publishing.
As a general rule basing your organization on the important issues in your subject works best, unless your topic is extremely narrow. Thus, rather than putting all relevant statutes under the heading "Statutes" try dividing the relevant statutes by the issue they cover. This is hard to describe, but is a natural outgrowth of the research and organizational process.
If you don't include a table of contents, you will be unlikely to meet the P threshold. People should not have to read a Pathfinder from cover to cover to find out if it covers an area they are interested in. This is pretty basic and failure to do this will cause us extreme displeasure.
Be consistent in the way you cite things but don't worry about the Blue Book. In fact, the Blue Book is often counter to our basic principle of citation, which is to make information easily accessible and understandable. Clarity, rather than precise form, is what makes your citations useful to us and others who are using your Pathfinder.
If you are interested in creating your pathfinder as a web document, please talk to an instructor. This is a good option for many topics, but is not a requirement for the class, nor is it a good choice for all topics. One thing we don't want you to do is to become obsessed with form over substance. If trying to make your Pathfinder fit into a web format is taking huge amounts of time, then don't do it, unless you really want to use the Pathfinder to learn how to create web documents.
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