This book seeks to explain the practical skills needed for print and online legal research and writing. It provides a current and comprehensive look at the topic, consolidating information on legal research and writing into one handy, easy-to-use resource. Written for both seasoned practitioners seeking to add the latest sources and techniques to their research arsenal, and for beginner law students who face a bewildering array of information, this book includes chapters on legal research and writing malpractice, the acquisition of research resources, international and foreign legal research, and knowledge management. In addition, it covers legal citation, the recovery of online legal research expenses, searching the new platforms of the major proprietary online legal databases, the increasing digitization of legal materials, and free legal research resources on the Internet, while also providing a list of over 1,300 leading Canadian legal treatises organized into forty-eight topics. Legal Research and Writing is the most up-to-date book of its kind available in Canada today.

Ted Tjaden, LLB, MISt, LLM, is a Canadian lawyer and law librarian called to the bar in British Columbia (1987) and Ontario (1996). He has practised law in a variety of circumstances, including as a commercial litigator, in-house counsel to Seiko Epson Corporation in Japan, and a research lawyer. In addition, his work at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, as a law librarian and adjunct professor, included teaching legal research at the Faculty in addition to teaching law librarianship at the Faculty of Information. He holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from Queen’s University, and both a Master of Information Studies and a Master of Laws degree from the University of Toronto. Ted is also the author of The Law of Independent Legal Advice (2d ed, 2013). In 2010, he was awarded the Denis Marshall Memorial Award for Excellence in Law Librarianship by the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and in 2008, Canadian Lawyer described him as a “luminary” of the Canadian blogosphere. Ted maintains a free companion website to this book (www.legalresearchandwriting.ca). In addition, as a hobby, he has created and maintains a different website called “Classic Ragtime Piano” (www.ragtimepiano.ca), where he makes available (for free) his research on ragtime piano, along with access to thousands of pieces of pre-1923 public domain, digital copies of ragtime piano sheet music.

Ted Tjaden's profile page