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Chapter 10: Ethics and Professional Responsibility in Legal Research

The duty of competent research, candor to the tribunal, and the supervision and verification obligations that ride along with every search.

Orientation

Explore the concepts from this chapter

Duties Behind the Research

Competence, candor, confidentiality, supervision — the four Model Rules duties, what each requires of your research, and a six-moment matching exercise.

What this module will let you do

The three duties, panel by panel
The consequences ladder — lost credibility to discipline
Build verification into the research workflow
Where AI use meets each duty

Practice

Apply what you’ve learned

Catch the Fabricated Citation

A short brief, eight citations, one closed database. Retrieve each authority — or discover it does not exist — then classify it: supports, does not support, negatively treated, or fabricated. Feedback names the verification step that catches each failure.

The Duty Calls

Eight fictional scenarios where the pressured move and the required move come apart — midnight citators, adverse authority, public AI tools, and a partner’s bad citation. Reasoning under every option.

What this module will let you do

Adverse binding authority the night before filing
Relying on unverified AI output
‘I didn't have time to update the cases’
Supervising another researcher's work