The Legal Affairs Department at Kuwait University organized a workshop entitled "Legal Research Foundations for Legal Administration Workers" on Sunday 19 January 2025, which was presented by Dr. Sarah Al-Sultan, a faculty member in the Public Law Department at the Faculty of Law at Kuwait University and a former member of the Fatwa Sector in the Fatwa and Legislation Department, in the presence of Acting Director of the Legal Affairs Department, Mr. Hamad Al-Bassam, and a number of department employees from senior legal specialists, researchers and legal consultants, with the participation of all legal departments at the administration such as the Litigation and Claims Department, the Consultations and Contracts Department, the Investigations and Grievances Department and the Implementation Department. 

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At the beginning, Dr. Sarah Al-Sultan addressed the types of legal writing and the distinction between them in the various professions which a legal professional can practice, including defense memoranda, judicial rulings, arbitration rulings, administrative investigations, minutes, fatwas, and legal opinions. 

Dr. Al-Sultan stressed the importance of the elements of legal fatwas in order to reach a sound institutional legal opinion, indicating that the fatwa must contain several elements, the first of which is the legal problems that revolve around a condition for imposing penalties on the legitimacy of taking a certain decision, and the second element is knowing the legal basis, so that the fatwa mentions all legal texts closely related to the disputed incident without any deficiency or excess, and the third element refers to the analysis of legal texts with the importance of mentioning the purpose of the text included in the explanatory memorandum without citing irrelevant facts while ensuring writing in a sequential, logical and clear manner, and the fourth element relates to the legal opinion, so that the legal texts are applied to the incident under investigation to reach the legal opinion, and the application is through projecting the legal texts onto the actual situation, and ensuring the availability of all the conditions that must be available contained in the legal texts. 

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Dr. Sultan explained sources that must be referred to when writing legal opinions, as the choice of source depends on the type of question and the researcher's familiarity with the subject, explaining that there are several common mistakes in writing legal fatwas, such as extreme brevity and failure to mention basic facts, in addition to not being accurate in searching for legal sources before starting to write the opinion, neglecting to mention some related legal texts and using different terms to refer to the legislation itself, and not being certain of the application of the law in terms of time and place and using words that are not common or familiar to the recipient, especially since the response must be limited to the question and not rely on general information. 

The discussion was opened by raising many questions related to legal matters through presenting a model memorandum with a legal opinion to respond to legal problems and the extent to which it is permissible to impose a penalty on the employee according to the legal frameworks.