Need To Get Up To Speed In A Pinch? Practical Law Is Your New Best Friend

Law is undeniably a demanding profession. While all attorneys navigate challenges on a daily basis, government lawyers face one of the toughest balancing acts out there.

It’s no secret that government employees are always being asked to do more with less. Far from being immune from the challenges of a public service profession, government lawyers seem to be facing an ever-uphill battle — seeing increased workloads of increasingly varied and complex tasks. Today’s average government lawyer spends six hours each week alone researching new and unfamiliar areas of law just to do his or her job. With precious little time to spare, there needs to be a better way to get up to speed in less time.

Thanks to Thomson Reuters, there is. Practical Law condenses legal issues down to their essence, making it easy to quickly learn about new areas of law. Better yet, their tools are designed to specifically address the most common challenges government attorneys face today.

One of the biggest struggles of being a government lawyer is being trapped in a constant zone of discomfort. When you’re constantly being asked to tackle new areas of law, you don’t have a chance to amass the knowledge base necessary to answer questions right away. Such levels of mastery are a luxury that only specialists get to enjoy. As the ultimate generalists, government lawyers need to find alternative ways to bridge the ever-shifting knowledge gaps in the most efficient way possible.

Practical Law supplies those tools. When it comes to gaining legal know-how in a pinch, nothing beats Practical Law. Think of it as your repository for nuts-and-bolts practice guidance you can digest quickly. If Westlaw is your go-to resource for diving deep and becoming an expert, Practical Law is its helpful counterpart and your starting point for gaining a solid background on new matters or topics. Simply put, Practical Law just makes your life easier when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory.

How does it do that? By providing expert guidance in how to apply the law to your practice. Practical Law offers practice guidance in 13 key practice areas — designed for practitioners, by practitioners. Thomson Reuters has over 230 full-time editors on staff, who write the kind of expert content they wish they’d had when they were practicing. The content is even broken out into designated Government Practice Areas, and they’re in the process of tripling the number of editors dedicated to creating content for government lawyers.

Whatever broad topic you’re handling, Practical Law offers unrivaled resources to help you get to the bottom of it. They’ve come up with countless tools to make your life easier.

• Practice Notes: These useful documents present concise overviews of particular areas of law or legal tasks, written in plain English. No legalese, no overly formal language — just the straightforward information you need to start tackling your project, designed to be quickly digested and easily understood. Key terms even link to quick-and-dirty glossary definitions that are extracted out into pop-up windows, so you don’t have to lose your place on the page. And like everything else in Westlaw, when you find a Practice Note that’s particularly helpful, you can folder it so you have it handy for future reference.
• Related Content: With your Practice Note, you’ll see a useful link to what’s called Related Content. This is a comprehensive list of everything you can find on Practical Law that pertains to your particular topic. The best part is, it’s not compiled through some random algorithm that thinks it knows what you might find useful. The list is compiled by the same editor who wrote the Practice Note, so it’s full of things you actually will find useful.
• Standard Documents: Any lawyer knows that research is often only the beginning of the story. Research can quickly turn into drafting when you discover there are suggested agreements or policies you should have in writing. When that happens, Practical Law has your back. They’ve amassed a repository of Standard Documents to help you out, which are gold standard templates for a range of policies, agreements, contracts, and other documents that often arise in government legal work, complete with drafting notes from the expert who prepared them, explaining the drafting process and identifying assumptions, pitfalls, and other considerations you might want to keep in mind. They’re downloadable to Word, and the handy “Maintained” indicator lets you know that they’ve been updated to comport with current practice and changes in the law.
• Checklists: These are just what they sound like — lists of issues and items that you need to consider on a particular task or topic. When you think you’re done, compare your work to the checklist just to be sure. This is essentially a backstop for making sure there isn’t anything you forgot to consider.
• Toolkits: A Practical Law Toolkit is your one-stop shop for a particular topic or task. All of the relevant resources mentioned above (and then some) are compiled into one place. From the Practice Notes down through the Checklist, the Toolkit for your given topic leaves no stone unturned when you need a comprehensive introduction to a topic in a short amount of time. Practical Law’s Government Resource Center offers a special collection of Toolkits created just for government subscribers, focusing on the top issues you face in daily practice.

Of course, these are just the highlights of what Practical Law has to offer. You’ll also find template presentation materials you can download straight into PowerPoint for delivering trainings, 50 State Surveys were you can compare the law on a given topic across jurisdictions, a What’s Market database that allows you to compare contract provisions against a range of precedent to determine what standard practice is, and even trackers that compile the latest executive orders and other administrative actions that implicate currents laws and regulations.

Simply put, if there’s something that would make it easier to get up to speed quickly on a particular area of law, Practical Law probably has it. For the busy government lawyer expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, there’s no more efficient way to get the knowledge you need, all in one convenient place, allowing you to confidently and efficiently approach your work, even when you find yourself in unfamiliar territory. Check out this free, on-demand webinar and explore how you can do more, with less, thanks to Practical Law.