Get Certified

No matter what stage of your legal career you’re at or which legal career path you choose, one thing that is certain is that at some point you’ll be required to do some research- legal research. Not the soft google/Wikipedia type but the hardcore-I’m-a-real-lawyer type stuff.

The majority of law firms and chambers in the UK subscribe to either Lexis or Westlaw as do most law schools. These are the primary electronic sources of all texts legal and it’s imperative that you know how to use them. As with anything they both have their pros and cons and you’ll inevitably develop a preference for one over the other but the choice may not be yours and you may have to settle for whichever service your institution subscribes to.

Learning to use and proving that you’re competent to research using either of these sources is easy, and even better, it’s free. Both Westlaw and Lexis offer online training and certification so that you can add this valuable tool your skillset and CV.

The interactive online tutorials are straightforward and easy to understand taking you through step by step at your own pace. They both have basic and advanced options. If you want to get certified, there is a test you can take and on successful completion they’ll send you a nice, not so shiny certificate so that you can prove just how lawyery* you are. The only catch with the test is that you’ll need access to either Lexis or Westlaw while you’re completing it as the test is comprised of questions that you have to ‘research’ the answers to using the appropriate database.

There’s really little excuse not to get yourself qualified and apart from improving your employability that little bit more, you’ll be better equipped to deal with those inevitable research demands.

*That’s not a real word!