Other Types of Treatises

The term "treatises" is somewhat broad and loosely defined. The multi-volume sets like the Standard Federal Tax Reporter and single volume works like The Complete QDRO Handbook are both treatises. Things like Nutshells and Hornbooks can also be considered types of treatises. In general, they all share the characteristic of focusing on one legal subject and they strive to be self-contained guides to that subject. The different types of treatises vary by, of course, their depth of coverage. The single-volumeBankruptcy and Related Law in a Nutshell will provide a less thorough discussion of that area of law than the twenty-six volume Collier on Bankruptcy, the major multi-volume treatise on bankruptcy law.

Practice Guides

Most of the secondary resources covered so far can be very useful for law students as well as practicing attorneys and legal professionals. But other types of secondary resources are specifically designed to assist attorneys in the actual details of conducting a law suit and other aspects of the practice of law. In general these resources are referred to as practice guides.

The practice of law involves such things as drafting contracts and other documents, advising clients, taking depositions and other trial practice duties, and the numerous other details of an attorney's professional life. Several different types of practice guides can help attorneys with these and the other tasks inherent to the practice of law.

Practice Guides: Litigation Tools

Litigation tools help attorneys prepare for certain types of trials. One example of this type of secondary resource isAmerican Jurisprudence Proof of Facts 3d (yes, published by the same folks who give us the legal encyclopediaAmerican Jurisprudence 2d), often referred to only as just "Proof of Facts."

Proof of Facts is a multi-volume set (as of 2014 it was over 120 volumes and growing), but it is dissimilar to an encyclopedia because it is not a closed set (it is more like a reporter, as new volumes, numbered in sequence, are constantly being published). Like ALR, each volume is a collection of detailed articles - or "Proofs", as the series calls them - that assist attorneys in preparing for trials and other judicial proceedings by demonstrating how to prove specific facts involved in the types of cases being discussed. And just like with ALR, when enough new proofs have been written, a new volume is issued. Here is the first page of a Proof of Facts entry related to a manufacturer's failure to warn of possible allergic reactions.

Here is another page from this Proof of Facts article on consumer products and the failure to warn of allergic reactions. This is a transcript of sample testimony of an injured plaintiff under direct examination at trial. An attorney preparing for a trial on a case like this could use this transcript as an example to draft their own examination of their client needed to establish some of the evidentiary foundations of the case. This sample direct examination continues for eleven pages in this volume of Proof of Facts. Different articles in Proof of Facts will provide different types of assistance and different sample items for attorneys, depending on the subject.

Practice Guides: Litigation Tools

There are a few other multi-volume series like Proof of Facts which provide similar types of litigation assistance, such as Causes of Action and AmJur Trials.

You can also find single-volume titles that assist in preparing for certain specific types of litigation, likeLitigating Sexual Harassment and Sex Discrimination Casesand Blashfield Automobile Law and Practice. Books like these are somewhat more like treatises, but focus on the trial practice aspects of those specific subjects.

Practice Guides: Form Books

Because much of the practice of law involves drafting documents, legal publishers produce a large variety of form books to help attorneys create these documents. Though called "forms", they should perhaps better be called "drafting guides" or "sample documents." They are not like tax forms as they are generally not issued by the courts or any other governmental body to merely be filled out and turned in (though some courts do provide such types of forms for certain routine transactions). Rather, most forms sets are examples of what lawyers can draft in particular situations. Each sample form will need to be customized to fit the specific facts of a case and the particular laws of the jurisdiction in which it is filed.

There are several major multi-volume sets containing forms. One set is yet another American Jurisprudence product, AmJur Pleading and Practice Forms Annotated. This set contains procedural forms: forms to help create documents that are filed with a court as part of proceedings related to a law suit. Other multi-volume procedural forms sets include Federal Procedural Forms and Bender's Federal Practice Forms.