Legal Research and Writing I introduces legal research method and legal writing, with particular attention to the format and construction of the memorandum of law. Students learn where legal authority comes from, how to find it, how to verify that it is still good, and how to present an analysis in the structured form the profession expects.
Within the SCNS taxonomy, PLA is the Paralegal/Legal Assisting prefix. PLA2104 sits in the core of an A.S. in Paralegal Studies and is the first half of a two-course sequence — this repository already carries its partner, PLA2114 Legal Research and Writing II. It appears at approximately four Florida institutions, including Florida National University, Pasco-Hernando State College, and Miami Dade College.
Legal research and writing is, by broad agreement within the profession, the most important skill a paralegal has. Specialized substantive knowledge can be acquired on the job; the ability to find the governing authority, confirm it is current, and explain what it means in writing is what makes a paralegal useful on day one and valuable thereafter.
Florida runs more than one numbering scheme for legal research and writing, and the titles do not disambiguate them:
SCNS equivalency does not cross numbers, and neither the suffix nor the level is decoration. A student who completed a 1000-level research course should not assume it satisfies a program requiring PLA2104, and a student transferring the first half of a sequence may be told to complete the receiving institution's second half. Have any transfer evaluated in writing, and read the credit value and description rather than matching on title.
The single most important professional habit taught in this course. Finding a case that says what you want is easy; confirming it is still good law is the work, and skipping it is how research causes damage rather than preventing it.
A case may have been overruled, reversed, superseded by statute, limited to its facts, or distinguished into irrelevance, and none of that is visible on the face of the opinion. That is what citators — Shepard's on Lexis, KeyCite on Westlaw — exist for, and it is why free full-text search alone is insufficient for professional work: a free database will happily return an overruled case with no warning.
Two Florida-specific points. Statutes change constantly, so check the effective date and the current version, not a cached copy; Florida amends heavily every session. And Florida has recently seen substantial change in areas paralegals research daily — the 2023 tort reforms, the 2025 civil procedure amendments, and the federal overruling of Chevron deference in 2024 — so secondary sources and textbooks more than a couple of years old will state superseded law with complete confidence. Rule 11 applies: verify against the primary source.
A paralegal may research and may draft; only a lawyer may give legal advice, and all work must be reviewed and adopted by a supervising attorney. Under § 454.23, Florida Statutes, the unauthorized practice of law is a third-degree felony, and The Florida Bar maintains an active UPL department.
The subtle point specific to this course: a memorandum written for an attorney is fine; the same analysis sent directly to a client is legal advice. The distinction is not the content but the recipient and the supervision. Two related habits: never sign or send legal analysis to a client under your own name, and never tell a client what a case means for their situation — refer the question to the attorney and make sure it actually gets answered.
Students who write well in English composition often struggle here, and the reason is that legal writing optimizes for different things. It is structured — the reader expects to find the conclusion, then the rule, then the analysis, in that order, and burying the answer at the end is a defect rather than a build-up. It is precise rather than elegant: the same term is used for the same concept throughout, and synonym variation for style creates ambiguity. It is relentlessly cited, because an unsupported assertion carries no weight. And an objective memorandum is not an argument — its purpose is to tell the attorney what the law actually is, including the parts unhelpful to the client, because an attorney surprised in court by adverse authority the memo omitted has been failed by it.
The habits that produce good grades and good work are the same: outline before drafting, cite as you write rather than reconstructing citations afterward, and edit ruthlessly for length — legal readers are busy, and concision is a professional courtesy that gets noticed.
Legal research is among the fields most visibly disrupted by generative AI, and it is also the field with the most vivid public record of what goes wrong. A current course must address it.
⚠ The failure mode here is famous and career-ending: AI tools fabricate citations. Large language models produce case names, reporter citations, and quoted holdings that look entirely authentic and do not exist. Lawyers in the United States have been sanctioned by courts for filing briefs containing AI-hallucinated cases, and the pattern has recurred repeatedly since. A paralegal who supplies an attorney with fabricated authority has created exactly that exposure, and "the software produced it" is not a defense.
The non-negotiable rule: verify every citation in the primary source. Open the case. Read it. Confirm it says what the summary claims and that it is still good law. This is not extra caution — it is the same validation the course teaches for all research, applied to a source that is unusually good at appearing reliable.
Where AI genuinely helps, used carefully: summarizing a long document you will still read, suggesting search terms and alternative phrasings, explaining unfamiliar terminology, and producing a first draft of routine correspondence. Purpose-built legal research platforms with retrieval grounded in actual databases are meaningfully more reliable than general chatbots — but still require verification.
Confidentiality is the other constraint. Client facts entered into a public AI service are disclosed, which implicates the attorney's confidentiality obligations and may implicate the firm's data obligations. Do not put client information into a tool the firm has not approved.
Court and bar guidance on AI use — including standing orders requiring disclosure or certification — has been issued and revised rapidly across jurisdictions. Verify current requirements in your jurisdiction rather than relying on this guide.
PLA2104 is a lecture course, 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, consistent with this repository's entire published PLA family. Expect graded research assignments, case briefs, and at least one full memorandum of law, with citation format assessed strictly — in legal writing, formatting is substance, and a brief rejected by a clerk for a citation defect is a brief not filed.
The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.
Two cautions specific to paralegal studies. The A.S. in Paralegal Studies is an applied degree and does not carry the A.A.'s guaranteed junior-status transfer into the state university system — students who may want a bachelor's should raise that with an advisor early. And this course is not a substitute for law school legal writing, though it is genuinely excellent preparation for it.
Generated September 2, 2026 · Updated September 2, 2026