Legal research is only one piece of the larger part of answering a clients legal problem. With the growing trend of fixed fee pricing, alternative fee arrangements, and other pre-arranged cost structures for legal work, it is more important than ever for a researcher to know several things that don’t relate to the problem their research is attempting to answer:
- Is there a fee arrangement that applies to the file being worked on
- Will he client accept research disbursements
- Is there a legal project budget that the research costs should fit into
- Will recorded time for the researcher be billed
Just as lawyers should talk to their clients about the budget before legal work, so to should researchers speak to their stakeholders.
