Tips for Law School Success: Legal research skills

Legal research skills are essential to law student success as summer associates.

TJSL has a brand new state of the art building including a library with cutting edge learning technology. TJSL reference librarians are experts, prepared to guide students in their independent acquisition of legal research skills throughout their law school career.  The law school facility, including the library is a tool that you have the right to use during your law student career.

• Librarians are experts in legal research, they can teach you how to research strategically so that your research process is efficient and effective. Students who seek their assistance early and often may be able to complete assignments more quickly and easily.
• Make a plan for your legal research education, because you will NOT learn all you need to know about legal research in the substantive law classes.
• Not sure what kinds of questions to ask your reference librarian? Check out this brief video (1 min 15 secs).

Students have many opportunities to plan and execute their legal research education with the guidance of experts (faculty and librarians).

References

• Law Library Reference Desk Questions By Catherine Deane
• Law Firm Legal Research Requirements of New Attorneys By  Patrick Meyer
• Thomas Jefferson Law unveils new home — on site of 300,000-year-old fossils By Karen Sloan, The National Law Journal, January 18, 2011

About your Faculty and Librarians

According to a recent survey, the most important criteria for judging the value of a law school is the faculty.

• At TJSL, we have world renowned faculty who have graduated from the top law schools, Harvard, Yale and Stanford.
• Even our full-time reference librarian, Catherine Deane, is a Princeton University graduate with three graduate degrees in law, anthropology, and library and information science.  She has several years of experience creating legal research guides for UC Hastings College of the Law.
• Part-Time reference librarian June MacLeod has over 30 years of experience as a law librarian including many years as the director of a huge downtown San Diego law firm.
• The interim director and former associate director Patrick Meyer also has three graduate degrees, and he comes to us from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he specialized in foreign and international law and Anglo-American legal research.  Meyer’s own research is largely focused on the importance of legal research skills to new lawyers.
• This means that TJSL students have experts on hand to assist them in acquiring the lawyering skills that will make them competitive with other San Diego law schools. (http://works.bepress.com/patrick_meyer/1/ )