MGT 220 : The Legal Environment of Business: Research Resources & Strategy

Nexis Uni

• Finding and tracking the company's legal cases and find statutes related to the legal topic.
• Finding law review articles discussing the legal issues related to the company
• Finding news articles about lawsuits or legal issues facing the company

HeinOnline 

• Finding law journal articles
• Finding state & federal Statues
• Finding Case Law

LII (Legal Information Institute of Cornell University)

• State Regulations and Laws
• Federal Regulations and Laws
• Legal information organized by topic

The field of Tort Law, which deals with lawsuits, is huge and complex. If you're looking for examples of lawsuits here are some common words that occur in business-related lawsuits. This is not a complete list! But these terms can help you get started.

Collusion

Conspiracy

Contract Dispute

Defamation

Disparagement

Fraud

Interference

Misrepresentation

Monopoly

Negligence

Unfair Trade

Federal, State and Local governments can regulate businesses in a variety of ways, through laws and regulations. The list below has some of the ways businesses can be affected. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. You might think of other ways!

• Taxes - State, Federal, Local and Excise
• Labor - Wages, Safety, Benefits
• Employment - Equal Pay, Accommodations, EEOC
• Antitrust - Collusion, Unfair Practices
• Advertising - Where, when and in what format your product can be advertised
• Environmental - How waste can be processed, for example
• Privacy - What information needs to be kept private
• Licenses - What licenses businesses or their employees need to have to perform their duties

• Don't forget to check for Trade Organizations! A Trade Organization is simply a group of companies in the same industry. There are thousands of them; from large ones like the National Association of Realtors, to small niche ones like the Tavern League of Wisconsin. Whatever industry you choose, there likely is a Trade Association for it, 
  Here's a list of trade organizations from Wikipedia to start from.
• If you're researching a company, the first question to ask: Is it a Private Company or a Public Company?
  Public companies trade on stock exchanges, and are required by law to make a lot of information available to the public.
  Databases like IBISWorld and Statista will likely have financial figures and statistics on them.
• The website of the Securities and Exchange Commission will have financial disclosure statements on public companies, called 10-K's and 10-Q's on their website. The SEC even has a guide on how to read a 10-K report. There's lot of information in a 10-K, and well worth a look!
• Private companies don't have to release much information, but there might be information about them in newspaper or magazine articles. You can find those in Nexis Uni, Proquest One, and other databases in our system.
• Also, Subsidiaries of a larger corporation are hard to find, even if it's a public corporation. Public companies aren't required to give specific information about their subsidiaries.
• But researching private companies isn't possible! You can still find information about Private Companies and Subsidiaries from news sources. You can look for news articles on Proquest One, for example.
• How can you find out if something is public, private, parent or subsidiary? Well, that's one good use for Wikipedia. Wikipedia may not be 100% reliable, but it's very organized. Look up the page on a company, and it should tell you if the company is public, private, subsidiary or some other classification.

Our Patents Guide has a section on Trademarks. 

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has a detailed list of trademark design codes you can look at to see what has been used before. It might help you brainstorm ideas!

For example, the Design Code for "Bears" is 030114. If you go to TESS, the official trademark database, and do a search for that code, you'll get a list of trademarks that use Bears in the artwork. Click on the Image List button to see a gallery of images.