Ten Tips for Legal Empiricists

This essay offers practical tips from leading legal empirical researchers to assist new scholars who are entering the field. Topics include developing meaningful research questions, designing robust survey methodologies, balancing qualitative and quantitative approaches, ensuring data transparency, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and navigating ethical considerations in empirical work. Drawing from their own unique challenges and successes, these scholars illuminate what they wished they would have known going into empirical research and the pitfalls to avoid. Although many examples focus on intellectual property law, the principles outlined here are broadly applicable to all legal empirical scholarship.

This essay aims to serve as a concise and accessible resource for aspiring empiricists seeking to produce impactful, methodologically sound research.