Are your students bore-ing?

Lawbore, CIty Law School’s legal portal, was recently featured in The Times (Clever law students let the Web do the work, 15 January 2009). In this article from the Spring 2009 issue of Directions the site’s creator, Emily Allbon, highlights what Lawbore has to offer.

Emily is law librarian and head of information literacy at City University London. In 2005 she was named Best Legal Information Professional – Academic at the BIALL/LexisNexis Awards for her work on Lawbore.For further information on Lawbore, click on the About link or contact Emily on e.allbon@city.ac.uk.

Making students less intimidated by the prospect of legal research was a key driver for the creation of Lawbore in 2003. The original version was designed in response to my experience that students relied too much on a limited number of sources, and to provide an online community for the law school.

Lawbore is split into four areas:

1. Topic Guides – essentially a guide to the best resources available on the Web for different subject areas. Arranged on a cool sliding menu into Core and Elective subjects, Research and Careers. The format is usually three main categories – the top picks of websites, commentary, and ‘hot docs’. Commentary can include speeches as well as articles from both free and subscription sites. Users can adapt a profile if they don’t want to see the stuff that’s only available to City students. ‘Hot docs’ are documents like key cases, legislation, Law Commission reports, and glossaries. The Careers tab includes links to information on careers, mooting and pro bono.
2. Forum – a chatroom offering different threads – Law Chat, Escape Law, For Sale/Wanted, Prospective Students, Mentoring and City Only. Sees the most traffic during revision time when everyone compares notes whilst panicking, but is used for the following types of queries too: What was that case Prof X kept going on about in the crime lecture today?, I’m thinking of taking maritime law as an elective, aren’t the books really expensive?, Help – how do I interpret the wording of this act?.
3. City Hub – the community side of the site, mainly for City Law School students. This offers a place for all student messages to go, with each course/year getting their own noticeboard. There is also general news, access to databases and the e-library, and a set of very popular useful links, Since this section was launched in October 2007 it’s been hugely popular and has become the first port of call for City students.
4. Learnmore – a know-how wiki designed to help students with all the knowledge they need that falls outside their core teaching – mooting, doing legal research, using law libraries, writing coursework and much more. The emphasis on creating resources for this section is very much on making them entertaining. There are a number of talking slide shows (made using Articulate) which have been really well received by students – they like the fact they can learn without having to read. Some of the materials have even been written by students. The materials on mooting are extremely popular, especially the Mooting beginner’s guide and the Know your judge piece which tells students how to deal with different types of moot judge (quiet, bored, bemused, mean…).

Quick guide to what Lawbore can do for your students

1. Encourages reading around subjects – highlighting useful websites, commentary and related documents online in Topic Guides.
2. Gives them free chapters from certain texts – we are working with publishers to allow access to free content (see Research Tools for a chapter from McBride’s Letters to a law student and Mooting for an excerpt from Kee’s The art of argument).
3. Offers a place for discussion – the Forum gives students the opportunity to ask questions in an environment where no one knows who they are. Perfect for those questions they’re too embarrassed to ask in tutorials!
4. Keeps them informed – using feeds from Linex Legal in some Topic Guides, and RSS feeds from other areas in Lawbore.
5. Gets them more confident about mooting – Learnmore provides a range of resources to support students new to this, including video clips and talking slide shows.
6. Makes equity & trusts more fun with a crossword (see Equity Topic Guide).
7. Brings all the ‘library stuff ‘ to life – Learnmore has a range of talking slide shows about legal abbreviations, using law libraries and the materials held within them.
8. Informs students about events, competitions and training days via City Hub.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010