This is a practical guide for law students new to the law. These can be either undergraduates starting a law degree, or postgraduates taking one of the professional conversion courses required to enter legal practice.
Topics cover the law student's higher education experience from the beginning, resources for research and writing, on to the end with examinations and employability.
Items that are particularly linked to student life include academic survival skills and plagiarism and its consequences. These parts could be useful to any students though the details are all given for law. Survival includes such things as taking notes, what lecturers expect from their students and time management. Very basic, but necessary.
There is a brief guide to the English legal system and its primary and secondary sources; then how to do legal research and legal writing. Legal language is very precise and standardised and it is essential to learn to work in the accepted way.
The chapter on referencing and plagiarism is very clear on the importance of referencing all quotes and also of expressing concepts in one's own words. These concepts are difficult to get across and these authors, both experienced academics, do an excellent job.
The centre of the book consists of a discussion of mooting, the conduct of mock trials for the students to practice presenting a case, and making persuasive arguments. The whole text is constructed around the activities of four typical students with different learning styles and abilities. At each stage, a short summary of points is presented along with what two or more of the students could have done, and an invitation to the reader to think about how they could have dealt with these issues.
Both of the authors teach in the law department at the City University which was an independent institution and has now become part of the University of London. A particular feature mentioned is the use of a social media network called Lawbore developed at this law department by Emily Allbon when she was the law librarian, (in collaboration with a computer programmer, Howard Richardson, and the legal academics running modules). Students are encouraged to communicate with each other and the academics on Lawbore, to read input from practitioners, to find out about events and relevant publications linked to their lectures, and to cover the full range of social media type activities. Lawbore is generally accessible on lawbore.net.
The last part of this book covers employability and, finally, revision and exams. This would seem at first sight to be the wrong way round as employment is the end point of the student process. But employability is treated as finding the transferable skills in the work students have been doing, practicing writing application forms and interview techniques and using the University's offerings of career fairs and other contacts with possible employers to their best advantage. One can plan out interview answers and application form statements just as one plans essays. The more a student thinks through and plots out the key points, the better they can come up with spontaneous and genuine sounding answers to the actual questions of employers, and get a good job.
And it is the same for the exams; one must revise systematically and do justice to the work put in – always assuming that work was there in the first place, of course.
Overall this is an excellent little book, intended for law students but useful as a reminder for more experienced practitioners when faced with the need to either research or formulate and write legal arguments. The tone is very practical; you need to think of this and try that. Use of four typical students and how they work on a problem for a moot is inspiring and adds a note of reality to all the examples. Both authors must have encountered just these students, and just these problems, in their own practices. As the title says, the focus is on skills and how students acquire them. I strongly recommend it for both students and libraries to buy.
