Mark Giangrande, one of our reference librarians and legal research instructors, has been invited to the Wayne State University Law School, to be part of a panel on "Practical Advice for Attorneys in Transition", on June 20, 2009.
The presenters will address such issues as the significant changes in the legal job market, needed skills in applying for jobs, using search engine marketing for one's legal practice, research at the Wayne State Law Library. Mark will be addressing the use of technology for firm management and litigation support. These are applications that usually do not get much attention in the law school curriculum where the emphasis is on Lexis & Westlaw for legal research and writing.
The importance of trying to provide law students and graduates with an awareness of these non-academic technological applications, is addressed in a 2008 article from the Albany Law Review ( 71 Alb. L. Rev. 201 ). It is entitled, "Teaching law office management: why law students need to know the business of being a lawyer", by Debra Moss Curtis, an Associate Professor of Law at Shepard Broad Law Center, Nova Southeastern University. Professor Curtis makes the point that the practice of law is a business and not just the application of academic skills learned in school. In the introduction to her article she says:
"The practice of law is a business. But while focusing on teaching law students to "think like a lawyer," law schools often omit to tell students about the economic realities of surviving in practice. Lawyers are not necessarily interested in or trained as business people and thus comes the harsh reality--if most lawyers had wanted to be business people, they might have gone to business school instead. So for many law students, the realization that to earn a living as a lawyer, they also have to learn a business, can be very challenging."
Given the difficult economic environment that new law school graduates are encountering, familiarity with such technologies should provide a competetive advantage in this tough market.
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