Jisc Change Agents' Network Conference 2024

As lawyers, the ability to conduct legal research is more than an academic pursuit, but can be an integral part of your day to day practice. As a result, we teach our undergraduate Law students how to research the law, however we are keen to ensure that the skills we are sharing are the most appropriate and up to date for the legal profession, by asking our recent Law graduates about their legal research skills.

To explore this in more detail, we created a student-staff partnership project with undergraduate law students working with a legal academic and our law librarian, to explore the skills that our alumni use in their day to day legal practice. We wanted to learn how we can improve the teaching and support for legal research skills within the degree course to make our students more employable and ready to step into the junior levels of the legal profession. 

Student partners are taking on the role of researchers, but also ambassadors for the university in connecting with and contacting former graduates from the School of Law. We invited alumni to complete a questionnaire about their experiences of legal research in practice and how they used the skills that they gained as an undergraduate, but also to identify gaps in our training. 

At the time of putting forward this abstract our next steps are to invite alumni for individual interviews and focus groups to find out more; these will be led by student partners.

We will share the outputs of this project and the good partnership practice strategies adopted with a focus upon the benefits to the student partners of working with alumni as they develop their own employability skills.