Brush up on Legal Research Skills! Get in the Game.

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 2 Comments

How can law students acquire competitive legal research skills while in law school?

The statistics are clear, there are more law students graduating from law schools than there are jobs for new lawyers. One way for law students to stand out from the crowd is to have demonstrably superior legal research skills.

Some skills that many law students graduate from law school without acquiring are:

1. Ability to use Digests in print and online to find cases on a particular topic

2. Ability to interpret Shepards and KeyCite signals

3. Ability to use Shepardization and KeyCiting to expand and update their legal research online

To provide opportunities for TJSL students to learn these legal research skills without enrollment in a formal Advanced Legal Research (ALR) class, ALR Professor Patrick Myers (Interim Director of TJSL Library) has created a video Tutorial on Using Case Law Digests.

ALR Professor Catherine Deane (Reference Librarian at TJSL) has put together a Research Guide on KeyCiting and Shepardizing® online.

Knowing how to use these resources efficiently can make your research tasks easier. If you prefer to learn from a live instructor, consider signing up for Advanced Legal Research in the Spring, or taking a Mini-Class on Digests or Shepardizing. Professor June MacLeod (Reference Librarian at TJSL) will be teaching a Mini-Class on Digests on Saturday October 15th at 10am.

 

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2 responses to “Brush up on Legal Research Skills! Get in the Game.”

  1. Ronique Breaux jordan | October 24, 2012 at 8:40 am | Reply

    Is the library providing mini-classes, webinars for research topics for online students?

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