Lawyers' Skills

Abstract

Lawyers’ Skills helps students develop the legal skills required for successful practice in the modern solicitors’ firm. The book equips students with a solid understanding of the theory and concepts underpinning the key skills areas of legal writing and drafting, interviewing and advising, practical legal research, and advocacy, enabling students to develop, practise, and refine the legal skills they will depend on throughout their professional career. It goes beyond coverage of the assessed skills, providing guidance on a range of professional skills that should be mastered before going into practice, including effective time management, negotiation, and email etiquette. The inclusion of realistic examples from practice, tasks, and reflective exercises reflects the interactive nature of skills as a subject and encourages students to develop, practice, and refine their legal skills. Chapter summaries, diagrams, and self-test questions are also featured throughout and provide additional learning support to students. The text is essential reading for all LPC students and is also a useful source of reference for practitioners wishing to refresh their legal skills. After an introduction, the book covers: interviewing and advising; legal writing; drafting legal documents; legal research; practical problem-solving; negotiation; advocacy and the solicitor; managing your workload; and continuing your learning.

The information-gathering practice of liberal professionals in a workplace setting: More than just seeking information

“…In addition, while recognizing and acknowledging the risk of granting erroneous legal advice based on outdated information (in concurrence to Attfield and Blandford, 2011; Makri, 2008; Webb et al, 2019), this study further explicates that ongoing search is an important professional duty of legal practitioners in Israel, needed to maintain a suitable standard and develop it. Lawyers may schedule in their diaries a designated time for ongoing search, which may even be short and limited, in which they focus their attention on this aim (as opposed to sporadically doing it) as a practical technique for regularly tracing and consuming significant developments in the law, in a time-restricted professional environment.…”

“…Lawyers’ skilled proficiency and its development rely on the consumption, processing, know-how, creation, delivery and management of a vast and growing scope of information (Jamshed et al, 2020; Ministry of Justice, 1990; Parsons, 2004; Scheb II et al, 2012; Van Opijnen and Santos, 2017). Therefore, information is a fundamental, material and vital feature in the practice of law – it is the primary tool lawyers use to examine the real cases presented to them, with their practical context, and solve legal issues arising from them (Chancellor, 2010; Cohen and Olson, 2018; Ellis et al, 2014; Evans and Price, 2018; Makri, 2008; Parsons, 2004; Strathausen, 2017; Webb et al, 2019; Wilkinson, 2001). When facing a need for relevant and useful information regarding some legal issues before them, the lawyers themselves (Leckie et al, 1996; Wilkinson, 2001) – or in a time-constrained professional environment, information intermediaries on their behalf (e.g.…”

“…They do so after having acquired comprehensive academic education and extensive occupational training with mandatory licencing, through their growing special knowledge and skills and progressing expertise in their respective exclusive fields. Such is the case with engineers, architects, nurses, accountants, real estate appraisers and also lawyers who are consumers, producers and users of a wealth of professional information (Berring and Edinger, 2008; Ellis et al, 2014; Kuhlthau and Tama, 2001; Otike, 1999; Parsons, 2004; Webb et al, 2019; Wilkinson, 2001).…”

“…The law is an intricate system of norms, permits, prohibitions and sanctions that aims to regulate function and behaviour within human societies (Strathausen, 2017). Legal content is vast and abounds with rules and case law (Berring and Edinger, 2008; Webb et al, 2019). It is complex and continually evolving (Ellis et al, 2014; Galloway et al, 2019).…”

Information disruptions and disruptive information sources in the practice of law: Obstacles in gathering information, through an Israeli lens

“…Lawyering is an information-intensive liberal profession (Bronstein and Solomon, 2021). A lawyer's legal work necessitates extensive and varied information (Krieger et al, 2020;Webb et al, 2019) gathered via various sources that grow in number and complexity (Leckie et al, 1996;Nwagwu and Ajibade, 2021;Rao, 2019). The latter encompasses, among other things, "human," "printed," and "electronic" sources of information, along with "internal" and "external" to the lawyer's practice and "formal" and "informal" ones (Solomon and Bronstein, 2016;Wilkinson, 2001).…”