Practice Guides: Forms

Besides procedural forms, the other main types of forms are transactional forms. These are forms used to carry out some sort of legal act, such as the creation of an apartment lease or the formation of a power of attorney, or to communicate with other parties pursuant to some legal proceeding. Another AmJur product, AmJur Legal Forms 2d, contains such transactional forms. This is a sample letter that an attorney might send to a manufacturer notifying them of injuries sustained by a client from use of the manufacturer's product. Other good sets of books with transactional legal forms include West's Legal Forms and Nichols Cyclopedia of Legal Forms Annotated.

Other Secondary Resources: Restatements

There are a few other types of secondary resources that can be useful during legal research. The first of these miscellaneous secondary resources are Restatements.

The Restatements of Law have been published by the American Law Institute ("ALI") since the 1930s. Most students and legal professionals are at least familiar with the Restatement of the Law Second, Contracts. The Restatements are summaries of law written with the goal of distilling a legal subject into precise and succinct statements.

For example, here is section two of the Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Products Liability. This section summarizes the three types of product defects in a clear, concise form.

Restatements can be useful because sometimes courts will specifically note that they have adopted the Restatement view on a particular legal question. Supplemental volumes of the Restatements contain annotations where these cases, and other cases that discuss sections of the Restatements, can be found.

Other Secondary Resources: Uniform Laws and Model Acts

Uniform Laws and Model Acts are just what the names say. The most widely-known of these is the Uniform Commercial Code ("UCC"). The UCC was first drafted several decades ago with the intent of creating a consistent - i.e., "Uniform" - set of commercial laws throughout America. It was subsequently adopted, either in whole or in part, by all fifty states. Other common Uniform Laws and Model Acts are the Model Penal Code and the Interstate Enforcement of Domestic Violence Protection Orders Act.

The set of books shown here, Uniform Laws Annotated, is a sixty-one volume set that contains the text of most Uniform Laws and Model Acts. It also provides you with information on what states have adopted which acts, and whether the states have made any changes to the text of the Uniform Laws and Models Acts they have adopted.

Choosing the Best Secondary Resource - Introduction

The final portion of this CALI lesson will give you a series of hypothetical legal research questions. For each question, there are three types of Secondary Resources listed. Based on what you have learned so far, choose which resource you think is the best one to start with for each question. While there are no absolutes in life, for certain legal research questions it is smarter to start with one particular resource than with others.

Question #1

You have a client who was injured while entering the revolving door of a local bank. To start your research, in which of the secondary sources listed are you most likely to find a good, thorough summary of this issue, along with some relevant case law? Click on one of the resources listed here.

ALR. Of the three secondary resources listed, ALR is probably the best for this research question. Legal encyclopedias are too general and law review articles usually don't cover the more nuts-and-bolts kind of cases that most attorneys deal with in their day to day practices, like personal injury cases that occur in a revolving door.

But ALR annotations cover numerous very specific and, in a word, quirky legal subjects. Shown here is the first page of an ALR annotation that is exactly on point. This sixty-four page annotation spells out all the specific legal issues involved with this type of injury and gathers together numerous cases where this type of injury occurred.