Legal Research

If you practice with an institution that represents clients with national or multi-state business activities, you can be sure that, at some point in your career, you'll be asked to "find the laws relating to X legal issue" in a handful of states.  If you're really unlucky, you'll be asked to do a 50-state survey of the laws in a particular area. 

Two law firm librarians, Margi Heinen and Jan Bissett, have just published a very useful research guide designed to help researchers tackle multi-state legal research efficiently.  You can find this guide, "Reference From Coast to Coast: Learning to Love Those 50 State Surveys," on the always-excellent LLRX.com.  The authors cover resources for multi-state research from Lexis and Westlaw as well as great free Internet resources, like the National Conference of State Legislatures' 50 State Legislative Tracking Web Resources, which links to multi-state surveys on different legal topics available on the web.