Preparing students for legal practice

LexisPSL helps students to think like a lawyer

The university law librarian at Oxford Brookes, Charlie Brampton, carries out training sessions for students to introduce them to legal databases and demonstrate how to use these effectively. She also shows them how to work with the law reports and conduct general legal research, following this up with one-to-one sessions.

Charlie encourages her students to make use of both LexisPSL and LexisLibrary to increase their commercial awareness skills. As part of training sessions held by the commercial awareness society, she demonstrates how the products can both help students to conduct legal research and to actually think like a legal practitioner.

Preparing students for legal practice

Charlie decided to provide access to LexisLibrary and LexisPSL for her students as these are often the very tools they will need to use if they decide to qualify as a solicitor or barrister and enter legal practice. Although there are certain resources law students will only ever need to use in an academic setting, such as specific academic tools relating to the submission of assignments, legal databases will always need to be used in their professional lives.

“A big factor in our decision to provide access to LexisNexis, is that is what is being used in legal practice. Although we don’t do the LPC, there is still the sense that we are preparing law students to go into practice in one form or another. I say to them that it is worth getting certification with LexisNexis because if you do go into practice this is something that you will continue to use.”

LexisNexis provides invaluable access to law reports

As with many university libraries, Oxford Brookes is dependent on resources which aggregate law journals, rather than subscribing to multiple individual journals. LexisLibrary helps to pull together all the important legal information from a wide range of sources and make it available in one place for subscribers. This now includes the full set of law reports. Having access to everything on a single database is useful for practitioners and law students alike.

“Having access to all of the full text journals and law reports is really important for our students.”

Learning tools of the trade

Erin Carus, second year law student at Oxford Brookes, plans to train as a barrister after university. Having joined the commercial awareness society, she received training from Charlie on using LexisLibrary. In her second year she has made most use of the case and legislation search functions, but she plans to make more use of the journal search aspect in her third year when preparing her dissertation. Erin thinks that learning to use LexisNexis products at university will stand her in good stead for legal practice.

“I think LexisNexis will be massively useful in my future career, I will definitely keep using it. Having certification with LexisNexis will also look good on my CV.”

Helpful summaries and up-to-date law

Erin finds LexisLibrary often provides answers far more quickly and accurately compared to trawling through the original legal sources. This can be particularly useful for students and junior lawyers.

“LexisNexis is very helpful when you are not clued up on something. It’s much easier to use an online tool compared to taking out different books in a library, especially when it comes to legal journals. It’s better than trying to figure out how the law has changed by navigating a government website, and more trustworthy than a Google search!”