Look it up before you leap: guiding students across the academic-vocational legal resources divide

www.city.ac.uk/law

Look It up before You Leap:

Guiding Students across the Academic-

Vocational Legal Resource Divide

Marcus Soanes The City Law School

City University LondonLilac 2010

www.city.ac.uk/law

Vocational Access to and Engagement with the Law Is Different to Academic Ones

• Academic and Practitioner Resources: the Bridgeable

Divide

• Collaboration, Motivations and Preferences in

Research: Practitioners and Vocational Students

• Vocational Students’ Metaphors of Their Research

• Vocational and Academic Course Design Proposals

and Discussion: Bridging the Divide

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Research Questions

• How do learners on the vocational programme

interact with the repositories of legal information as

part of the knowledge creation process?

• How do these interactions compare to those

experienced by junior lawyers in practice?

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Data Capture Methods• Student Questionnaire

– 524 FT + 44 PT Yr 1 = 568 students– 475 returns = 83% response rate

• Focus Groups (x2: 3 & 6 students)– Presented a summary of the questionnaire analysis– Sought details of student legal research practice– Tested preliminary theories/conclusions– Opportunity for students to ask questions

• Practitioner Survey– 12 members of the profession– Paper open-script questionnaire– Sought out more recently called practitioners

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Practitioner Collaboration & Motivation• Practitioners did not explicitly exchange knowledge or share

skills when searching for legal information• The skills and methodologies required to support effective

research were probably developed by the individual when• Working alone, and

• Drawing on personal experience

• They most commonly researched in preparation for advising– 8/12 preparation for advice giving tasks i.e. conference (4) or writing

an opinion (4)

• They were motivated to increase their legal knowledge on a needs-must basis– 6/12 needed to locate established but less familiar law & a further 2

to refresh their memory

– 3/12 were investigating ‘cutting edge’ legal developments

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Practitioner Preference

• Practitioners prefered paper to online resources when accessing legal commentary– Respondents selected books which they identified as

authoritative & which they were able to access easily

• Practitioners used a wide variety of online resources– Online resources were used to update procedural rules and

case law, but accessing commentary online was not common

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Student Collaboration• Student collaborative study habits:

– Research is primarily perceived as a lone, intellectual activity (this matches the practitioners’ perception)

– When students do meet they rarely make formal arrangements, many meetings are serendipitous

• Thus unless an individual student is able and willing to conduct research for himself or herself, it either won’t be done at all or will be done incompletely and incompetently!

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Students’ Motivations to Research• Frequency of research

– Opinion Writing and Legal Research: always/often– Litigation and Evidence: frequently and equally for each

subject– Advocacy: only occasionally– Drafting: rarely

• Deepening legal knowledge– Legal Research and Opinion Writing: the vast majority of

students research to deepen their legal knowledge– Advocacy: on the whole students do so– Drafting: some but not all

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Student Motivators to Conduct Research

Motivators

• Lack of confidence

• Fear of error/correction

• Written work more than oral

• Opportunities to deploy

academic research habits

• Assessment/grading

De-motivators

• Laziness and not taking

preparation seriously

• Inconvenience of access to

resources

• Reliance on course

materials

• Oversimplification of legal

issues

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Students’ Metaphors for Researching the Law I

Task-related metaphors• Gazing: e.g. seen, overview, every single view point, show it to

me, focus • Journeying: e.g. finding new routes, where to start, starting point,

going back, going into depth, cover all my bases• Searching 1: Seeking

– e.g. going back, click around (online), feel around, find out, leads, don’t want to miss anything, discover, missing

• Searching 2: Questing– e.g. covering same or similar ground more than once i.e.

‘seen it before’, hit the ground running (at start of course), mystery, right answer (opinion writing).

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Students’ Metaphors for Researching the Law II

Emotion-related metaphors• Apprehension of loss of face • Not wanting to ‘screw it up’• Research as a security blanket and a

reassurance

• Atmosphere in library during assessments described as ‘crazy’ and ‘frantic’

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Students’ Metaphors for Researching the Law IIIConcepts of Fault and Forgiveness• Errors framed as failings that required forgiveness• Formal assessments perceived as the ‘last chance’• Public shame and personal guilt associated with evaluations of

student’s private endeavours and personal abilities• Public judgments in classroom and assessment closely

associated with the ever-present threat of humiliation

Missing Metaphors• Enthusiasm for the law • Interest in the tasks• Appreciation of the value of legal skills only featured in passing in

the students’ accounts of their study behaviours• Concepts of professionalism did not appear at all

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Recommendations for Vocational Course Design I• It is unwise to presume a base-level familiarity with ‘core

law’; therefore it is suggested that tutors:– Acknowledge that students are still learning ‘core law’ as well as the

skills & knowledge including specialist law– Explicitly instruct students of the need for confirmatory research in

all skills work– Challenge students to seek expert/specialist legal knowledge– Promote the transferability of research skills– Link research tasks to skills exercises– Don’t isolate research in the ‘Legal Research Course’– Acknowledge and address the students’ emotional responses to

their learning experience both positive and negative– Engender a sense of pride and professionalism in students

• Note that legal research skills will no longer be discretely assessed on the new Bar Professional Training Course

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Recommendations for Vocational Course Design II

• Ineffective Student Habits:– ‘grazing’ across several sources for similar information– ‘security blanket’ and book hogging– ‘magpie’ and ‘kitchen sink’ over-thorough and repetitive

• Strategies to Address Ineffective Habits:– Decision making strategies for multiple resource searching– Instruction on the purpose, content, structure, and updating

facilities of resources– Decision rules for selecting resources and legal material– Time management strategies to balance effort and benefit– Coping strategies for working under pressure as distinct from

‘winging-it’ habits

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Discussion Points for Academic Course Designers

• When and where on academic programmes should learners be required and equipped to research the following?– Primary legal resources– Practitioner commentaries– Remedies, sentencing, evidence and

procedure

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