Developing Essential Research Skills for Law Practice: The Legal Research Competency Program

Abstract A long-standing gap exists between the legal research skills of many new law school graduates and the ones they need to succeed in the practice of the law. It is simply too difficult to teach legal research solely as part of the first-year required Legal Research & Writing course, which involves a single faculty member trying to teach a whole new way of writing at the same time as a whole new way of researching. Law librarians are the legal research experts in every law school, and they deploy a variety of solutions to try to address this gap. This article addresses one such solution: a noncredit legal research competency program to help students develop and strengthen their legal research skills. It is a flexible model that provides legal research instruction through a variety of techniques and across a variety of mediums.