Skills & Values: Lawyering Process, Legal Writing & Advocacy

The Skills & Values Series is an innovative hybrid series of subject-specific, practice-oriented books and online materials supported by Web Courses (powered by Blackboard 9.1). The series is designed as a tool for professors to teach practical and analytical skills that can help students serve future clients competently, skillfully, and in an ethical manner.

Skills & Values: Lawyering Process, Legal Writing and Advocacy consists of 14 chapters that provide students with an introduction to the key aspects of the lawyering process, from understanding what lawyers do, to research, writing, citation, writing style, drafting, persuasion, and oral arguments. These chapters provide introductory reading on each topic, with supplemental reading sometimes offered by the professor, and examples, quizzes, checklists, and tutorials provided online.

There are also be opportunities for the student to identify and consider ethical questions that confront lawyers every day. They are designed to help the student along the journey to forming his or her own professional identity as a lawyer. Professional identity includes a lawyer's decisions about these behaviors, his or her sense of duty as an officer of the court and, perhaps most importantly, his or her sense of responsibility as part of a system that is engaged in upholding the rule of law.