Making sure students graduate ‘career‐ready’ is at the heart of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) Law School’s ethos. In fact, they consistently rank in the top 15%‐20% of UK law schools for graduate employability.
The lecturer’s perspective
For Senior Lecturer Lucy Blackburn, that means moving beyond the theoretical to the practical — not just knowing the law but understanding how to apply it in practice. She believes LexisPSL helps bridge that gap.
In Blackburn’s own words:
“Not only do we have this responsibility to our students to get them career‐ready, we have this ongoing responsibility to get them well‐versed in legal guidance tools, such as LexisPSL, which they’ll be using in their day‐to‐day role.”
LexisPSL speeds up all aspects of legal work, ensuring that the law can be easily understood and applied. It provides practice notes that offer how‐to guidance, templates, and current awareness alerts that provide the latest updates on topics of interest, all vitally important for lawyers in practice.
Lucy Blackburn finds LexisPSL just as useful in her own role:
“It’s so efficient. I can go in and find everything that I need to prepare a session, teach a session, prepare an exam — anything. And the weekly updates make it easy to keep on top of anything we need to change or update in our teaching.”
“Some students are still under the impression that when they go into practice, they will have to draft a document themselves, from start to finish. So to be able to show them what they’ll be using and how they’ll be using it, is really useful. If you’re teaching on a legal practice course and you want to give your students real documents and get them used to finding information the way they would research a file that a partner brought for them, LexisPSL is indispensable. I’m evangelical about it.”
The student’s perspective
According to a UCLAN LPC Masters student, having access to LexisPSL was especially useful during the practical research module of her degree.
“LexisPSL is really good when you need to get a general overview on how to apply the law, whether it’s something very niche, or just an area of the law you haven’t encountered before. Not the legislation, but how it works in practice, the forms I’m going to need, the procedures that I’m going to have to follow. It’s all there.”
She also believes that knowing how to use tools like LexisPSL and legal research platform LexisLibrary gives students an advantage when they finally go into practice.
“I’d certainly never seen anything like it before coming here. And, knowing that it’s similar to things that will be used in practice is reassuring. Nobody wants to go into practice with their eyes shut.”
Pressure to demonstrate more than just academic abilities
UCLAN identified that by switching to a more application focused course it was important to begin to introduce students to the type of technology used in law firms before they finish their degree.
UCLAN chose LexisPSL because it offers students the opportunity to gain first‐hand knowledge of a leading practical guidance tool trusted by 88 of the top 100 law firms.
“The interview advice I give to my students is to mention using LexisPSL. This demonstrates they have the ability to use a leading guidance platform and can comfortably navigate it to obtain the information they need.”
“If you’re teaching on a legal practice course, LexisPSL is indispensable. I’m evangelical about it.”
LexisPSL has evolved into Lexis+® UK
All our practical guidance tools and content are now fully integrated with legal research on Lexis+ UK, see the practical guidance and the underlying law it supports all in one place.
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