Town-Gown Collaborations for Enhancing Student Research Skills

Universities have long been criticized for not ensuring their graduates possess the necessary skills to be successful in the workplace. Studies and employer surveys highlight law students’ lack of practice-ready skills, including their legal research and writing skills. This paper examines the skills gap and presents a case study of a collaborative endeavour of law librarians in Calgary, Alberta, Canada to enhance the research skills of first and second year law students entering their first legal employment positions. Academic, firm, government and courthouse law librarians collaboratively developed and presented a legal research workshop, called Research in the Real World, which has now been held for three successive years. The case study will cover the steps employed in developing the workshop, detail suggestions of attendees that were incorporated to improve the effectiveness of the workshop, and examine the reasons the workshop has been successful.