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

Marcus Soanes (City University) explored the skills and emotional vocabulary students need to progress from the undergraduate study of the law to issue focused engagement with legal resources in practice.

Marcus’ slides are embedded below.

This presentation grew out of a research project on the Bar Vocational Course that enquired how its learners interacted with repositories of legal information and how to encourage appropriate use of practitioner commentaries and primary sources. The project considered the knowledge creation process, and, on a smaller scale, compared the students’ experiences to those of lawyers in practice. It also sought narratives from students about their experience of making the progression from undergraduate to vocational learner in an attempt to understand better their emotional response to this transition.

The key differences amongst the various repositories of legal knowledge – academic, professional and primary – were addressed in order to define terms and explain the skills students need, as well as the difficulties they experience, when making the transition from academic stage to vocational stage learners.

The project led to a number of changes to the programme and some restructuring of the library and its resources. Key findings are given below.

1. Practitioner habits – the results suggest that skills and methodologies for effective research are developed by the individual lawyer working alone drawing on personal professional experience. Nothing approaching a community of practice for the purpose of creating and sharing legal knowledge emerged, and it is highly likely that working environments and patterns exert an influence here. It is debatable whether or not this experience is peculiar to the Bar. Lawyers in practice rarely use academic texts, favouring publications designed for practitioners and, of course, primary sources.
2. Student habits – vocational students perceive legal research as an individual intellectual task. Infrequent and brief interventions in social contexts do occur, but there is little evidence of collaboration. The students’ working behaviours are best described as strategic and needs driven. Access to key data will be sacrificed when impediments are encountered and where a preferred working environment compromises that access. Greater effort is expended in preparation for text based tasks than for interpersonal skills ones. Students noted a willingness to use practitioner resources when specifically required to do so, but were heavily reliant upon prior learning (often based on student texts) and had a marked reluctance to use primary sources – some were apparently ill equipped to navigate and exploit them.
3. Student metaphors – some concepts were notably absent from the students’ stories of their research habits, including pride in their work and learning achievements, enthusiasm for the law and emergent professionalism. However, the students’ accounts suggested that the library can be a site for conflict and the classroom one for competition. Negative and passionate stories recounted by students about their research habits also suggest internal struggles that largely go unreported by students and unacknowledged by tutors.

The library and academic staff have worked closely to devise support for students to cope better with practical problems and the emotional anxieties about planning and executing research into practice based law. Attempts have also been made to embed legal research more deeply into the programme. For example, the need for research has been highlighted in subjects such as drafting and advocacy, which were perceived as ‘law light’ by students.

About Marcus

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Marcus Soanes is a barrister and principal lecturer at the City Law School. He has designed vocational programmes for the Bar and the Criminal Litigation LLM and teaches legal research and opinion writing as well as dissertation supervision. Marcus also trains police, private clients and experts in witness familiarisation and contributes to the Solicitors’ Higher Rights of Audience programme.
 
In 2006 Marcus was awarded the City University Teaching Fellowship, which enabled him to undertake research into vocational students’ engagement with legal resources. He has a special interest in online learning, which grew out of a Masters degree in online and distance education.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010