An Ode to Legal Research

The idea of writing here has always been simple - it is based on the hallowed principle of work-avoidance. For months I haven't really had call for it, and this blog has thus remained fallow and infertile. Now, however, I have the mother and father of all work which needs avoiding, and so the Duck rises, quietly quacking to itself, from the ashes.

Allow me to describe in brief the joy of Legal Research. Note the capital letters - I'm not talking generally about research of a legal nature. That's useful, and necessary. Probably. Although frankly, we've had a person talking at us for an hour about just how useful and necessary it is, which always makes me wonder.

Instead, I speak of the module that the Bar Council apparently decrees that we must undertake in our BVC, entitled Legal Research. This essentially involves taking a legal problem, and then copying and pasting half of the Internet into Microsoft Word. It is then necessary to highlight sentences at complete random, and then to enclose a few miscellaneous comments in little boxes.

The end result, when printed, is the size of a small moon, and contributes to 17% of total global deforestation. Suffice it to say that Al Gore has the BVC providers listed as the first people to be forcibly buried when he rules the world.