The legal system requires proof and in 2015 science is often likely to provide it, so lawyers need to know what is good science versus the junk kind.
Some lawyers will want to exploit the gray area in between. Court cases are littered with examples where an expert was brought in specifically to advocate for a position that an attorney was being paid to promote.
Lawyers for the other side also need to know what is credible science versus only for the incredulous. Edward Casmere, Brittany Robbins and Shane M. O'Connell writing at The National Law Review outline the biggest pitfalls attorney will face, either in making a case or defending one. While to scientists the big errors exploited by anti-science groups will be things like a p value fetish, under-powered studies or unweighted random-effects meta-analyses, to lawyers the problems to watch out for will be a little more practical.
Do some background on the study, is one recommendation. If an article on food mentions Charles Benbrook or Gilles-Eric Séralini, for example, it is not going to be pro-science, it is for an audience that thinks organic strawberries "feel" better than traditional ones or that shoddy, unethical studies are okay, as long as the conclusion is against genetically modified organisms. Other recommendations the trio make are just as common sense: Detractors of science frequently get correlation and causation all wrong, so it won't be a surprise when people cherry pick papers to do just that and use the results for their own ends.
Read their advice here.
