One of the things people find frustrating about research of any type is that there isn’t always a ‘perfect answer’ out there to find. Those moments where fireworks explode in your head and you have to resist air punching while shouting, ‘Get in!’ in the silent space of your law library, are not as common as you might hope. As a student, those frustrating moot problems or assessed problem questions are written specifically to make research tricky – clear-cut answers will elude you … this is the point! What is fantastic, however, is that the tools you have at your disposal make the research process far less painful than it was for those digitally starved law students of even 15 years ago.

• Practitioner text – as the name suggests, these are used by those in practice. They are very thick, expensive leather-bound volumes on a specific area of the law, and act as ‘the Bible’ for practitioners in that area. Examples include Chitty on Contract, Clerk & Lindsell on Torts, Archbold for crime. Good for finding succinct detail and signposting to key authorities.

Remember, when reading a book, the unassuming footnotes are worth reading carefully – they will offer other great leads to sources that might shed more light.

Each piece of work you submit as a student will be marked on the basis of a number of assessment criteria – research will always form part of this. Your lecturer needs to see that you have used sources of quality to back up your own work. Every proposition you make needs an authority to lend it weight. The sources you select will tell your lecturer a great deal about the work you have done.

How a resource is made available (hard copy or online) will be dependent on your university library’s collection management policies and budgets. Some titles may be available on the shelf at one university but online at another, for the really lucky students you’ll have the choice of both formats. Everyone has a preference and although many like to look at cases online, there are those who feel they can only really take in a judgment if they are looking at the printed source. E-books still have a way to go before they become as desirable as those on the shelf.

You may be surprised to learn just how expensive legal resources are – a practitioner text can be anything from £450–£700, with the online version no cheaper. Legal databases cost many thousands of pounds annually. Libraries clearly wouldn’t pay this unless it was completely necessary, which should indicate how essential it is that you exploit these resources as much as possible. Legal information is very expensive indeed and recent years have seen many changes. You will always have to go beyond your favourite online source because different publishers own different content, so you need to be open to this. Smaller publishers who used to allow their content to be displayed on Lexis or Westlaw withdrew it as soon as they could develop their own platforms. This makes it trickier for consumers – the law students, academics and practitioners – as they need to learn the tricks and tips of each individual resource.

Google is great as long as you understand its limitations – we use it all the time to find stuff – looking at the last 24 hours of our search history as we write this shows us looking for inspiration for unusual wedding gifts, an instruction manual for a new camera and recommendations for books about Australia (holiday coming up!). We do search for law-related information too, although it’s more typical that we’ll know what we want and where we shall find it.

Wikipedia has dug us out of many a hole when it comes to needing a bit of information at our fingertips – let’s face it, it’s the first port of call for most. However it should just be the beginning of a research journey and one that you should treat sceptically. This is a website edited by the community – you may have written some Wikipedia content yourself? Do you feel happy about depending on information that could have been written anytime, by anyone? If you’re relying upon a source in your written work, you need to be able to trust it.

There are risks associated with looking for information freely available online but as long as you are always wise to them, then doing your legal research via a combination of subscription databases and the free sources online should work well. So what are the risks?

• Authority – if you find something freely online, how do you know if you can trust it? Remember, any idiot can post their pearls of wisdom (believe us, we’ve done it!), you need to be sure of their credentials, particularly before you merrily add a quote from them in your latest essay.

• Bias – as above really … anyone can post and you need to be sure of his or her motivation. Sometimes even quite ‘official-looking’ sites can be as flaky as an almond croissant. Keep a close eye on sites of pressure groups – googling will often take you to pages of statistics or policy documents, make sure these are from an organisation that you know is trustworthy, and not from a random group with an axe to grind.