Eight Habits of Highly Effective Researchers

Many thanks to today's guest poster, Dan Ferro, Manager of Corporate Resources at Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson LLP in New York. As his first offering he has provided his analysis of what makes a good researcher.

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Having worked as a researcher and managed researchers for more than 20 years, I've noticed that those who excel share certain approaches to their work, and have performance characteristics in common. Most of my experience has come from researching corporate contracts and the corporate transactions market but I believe the following would be relevant in any area of research.

Intellectual Curiosity - Researchers should be intellectually curious, and it is a great advantage to have a genuine interest in the material you are researching. Without interest in the material, research can become dry and boring very quickly.

Perseverance – Do not take no for an answer. Assume what you are looking for is there to be found. If you’ve looked at 25 documents and haven't found it, try 50 or 100. If you have tried five different search strings and found nothing, try ten.

Resourcefulness and Creative Thinking – Don’t look solely to plug names or numbers into a database and get results. It is great when we can do that, but it is not research. Think about other ways to construct your text search or synonymous phrases for your search term. Think about solving the problem from a different angle.

Communication – Communication and clarity are important to attorneys. Often they do not know how we do what we do. If you are giving documents that are not 100% on point, explain why. If an attorney asks for X and you give Y, with a thorough explanation that is often OK. Without an explanation, your customer may think you did not understand the request.

Thoroughness – Make sure your work product fits the request as closely as possible. Just because your search string retrieved a document, does not mean it answers your customer's question. Be certain you understand what you are searching for and how your results fit the context of the request.

Questions – Unless you are 100% sure you understand the request, ask questions. Ask someone else in your working group, the attorney who gave the request, or another attorney with expertise in the field. Be careful when asking certain attorneys for clarification, since they may not be 100% certain themselves and may become defensive regarding questioning.

Attitude – Requestors should be made to feel that their work is important and will be handled promptly and efficiently. Do your best to have a positive, service-oriented mentality.

Presentation – It’s important to clearly sort documents and flag relevant provisions or pages. The documents we work with can be 50 – 100 pages or more and customers may become frustrated if they have to flip through several pages to find the one or two relevant portions.