No legal expertise down the hall?
Start your “How do I…?” questions here. Move from question to confident work product with expert best practices, thought leadership, and AI-powered solutions built on attorney-written practice notes, templates, and checklists.
Why this matters
A 'How do I…?' might start with a search
Finding the right template, practice note or checklist can take longer than the task itself.
No one is an expert in everything
New practice areas, unfamiliar jurisdictions, and one-off matters all call for a fast, reliable way to get up to speed.
Generic AI and outdated precedents sound confident
Guidance only holds up when it comes from authoritative content that experienced attorneys keep current.
Get up to speed on complex matters
- Expand your expertise by leveraging practice notes that provide plain-language explanations of complicated legal issues.
- Get up to speed on a new or existing matter so you can do more work in less time.
Practical Law resources for employment attorneys
Get up to speed on employment matters with a practice note and a checklist from Practical Law attorney-editors, plus links to related toolkits.
Faster drafting with standard documents and clauses
- The best templates come with the drafting notes: why a clause is there, when to change it, and what the other side is likely to push back on.
- Consistent starting points reduce risk and rework, whether you draft one agreement a month or hundreds.
Practical Law for Commercial Contracts
A packet of subscriber resources from the legal industry’s most trusted how-to service.
A legal team of one generates big outcomes with Practical Law
Step-by-step guidance for unfamiliar practice areas
- A checklist turns experience into a repeatable process, so key steps and issues don't get missed under deadline pressure.
- Timelines, flowcharts, and decision trees make complex matters easier to plan, delegate, and explain to clients.
A sole general counsel minimizes legal spend and complexity
LifeStraw’s only general counsel uses Practical Law’s ready-made resources to work through new and unfamiliar issues and keep compliance on track across global markets.
AI for your practice area
- Cut review time by processing up to 10,000 documents simultaneously and generate court-ready documents in minutes.
- Rely on pre-curated prompts and workflows that help support practice area-specific legal processes and tasks.
Focus your time on families, not paperwork
Every family law challenge — one powerful AI solution
In civil litigation, every deadline matters and every detail counts
Personal Injury law solution
AI for transactional legal work
Your next "how do I?" answered by experts
Practical Law puts practice notes, templates, and checklists from more than 650 attorney editors at your fingertips. With CoCounsel Legal, you can ask in plain language and get answers linked to the source.
Have questions? Contact a representative
Frequently asked questions
Legal how-to guidance is practical, expert-written help with the everyday question "how do I do this?" It usually takes the form of practice notes, templates, and checklists. Primary law tells you what the rules are. How-to guidance explains what they mean for a specific transaction, dispute, or jurisdiction, and walks you through the steps to get the work done. Tools like Practical Law provide this guidance, created and maintained by attorney-editors.
Start with a practice note to understand the key issues. Use a checklist to plan the steps. Then draft from a template with drafting notes, rather than from a blank page or an unverified AI prompt. Check jurisdiction-specific requirements, and confirm the resources are current before relying on them.
A practice note is a concise explanation of a legal topic, transaction, or procedure, written for practitioners. Some give a broad overview of an area of law. Others go deep on a single issue, covering key considerations, common pitfalls, and links to related templates and checklists.
A legal form is usually a fill-in-the-blanks document, often required by a court or agency. A legal template, or standard document, is a drafting starting point that you adapt to the deal. Professional templates include drafting notes that explain each clause, the choices available, and negotiation tips.
Checklists break a matter into its key steps and issues, so nothing important is missed. They may take the form of timelines, flowcharts, tables, or decision trees. They are especially useful for planning a transaction, delegating work, and handling a matter in an unfamiliar practice area.
Reliable know-how is monitored continuously and updated when the law or market practice changes. Practical Law attorney-editors review legal developments, update affected resources, and record changes in each resource's history. Users can also set alerts to be notified when a resource changes.
No. AI makes expert guidance faster to find and apply, but it does not replace the expertise behind it. General-purpose AI can produce a plausible-looking template, but it may miss jurisdiction-specific requirements or current law. The most reliable approach is AI that is grounded in trusted, maintained guidance and cites its sources, with an attorney reviewing the result.
Look at who writes and maintains the content, how often it is updated, and how many practice areas and jurisdictions it covers. Check whether templates include drafting notes and whether its AI answers link to verifiable sources. Also consider how well it fits into research and drafting tools you already use, such as Westlaw and CoCounsel.
.png){kind=logo}
