Centre for Legal Education

Desperately seeking Johnny Utah…

In the third of a series of posts on the challenges of designing vocational skills training during a pandemic, Helen Taylor (Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School) discusses the skill of staying positive in challenging situations: In the Christmas break, I caught up with a film I had not seen in a long time…Point Break. […]

Final post on the NLS client interviewing competition 2017/18

The client interviewing competition 2017/18 has now been concluded. The standard of student performance has been very high this year and made decision making for the judges very difficult. The final took place on 15 November 2017 in the Legal Advice Centre. The student teams were judged by Faye Deverell (senior supervising solicitor Nottingham Law […]

More on the NLS Client Interviewing Competition 2017/2018

The client interviewing competition continued with a training session taking place on Tuesday 17 October. Student competitors were briefed to access online materials to observe a series of interviews prior to the meeting in order to understand the broad concept of the interview and to model good practice. My focus for the training is to […]

NLS Client Interviewing Competition

On Friday 11 December 2020, Joreen Richardson and Becky Hankin were crowned winners of this year’s Nottingham Law School Client Interviewing Competition.  Megan Shirley (NLS Lecturer) was joined by two guest judges in the Final; Julie Higginbottom (NLS Pastoral Advisor) and Oliver Maxwell (Senior Solicitor from Nelsons).     This year the competition was run online […]

NLS Client Interviewing Competition 2017/18

The interviewing competition for NLS students has now commenced for 2017. An excellent opportunity for students to improve employability skills for law and non-legal professions. We are using our experience and expertise to train  students in order to  give them confidence in their own abilities to communicate effectively and with the necessary compassion and understanding […]

Simulated Clients

How the experiences of medical professional education can help the development of young legal professionals In terms of professional development, it is often a good idea to turn one’s head to the professions of others to see if lessons can be learned and practice developed that may lead or enhance what we have now. The […]

Student Competitions move online for 2020

The Centre for Mediation and Dispute Resolution recently ran a very successful negotiation competition for all students of Nottingham Law School using Microsoft Teams.  Training was provided to the students via the platform and live competition rounds took place via its meeting format.  The internal competition was a precursor for national negotiation competitions and the ICC International Medication competition, […]

Talking about your own experiences and values is vital to wellbeing

Helen Taylor, Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School, continues her series of articles on the integration of professional identity in professional skills courses: Quite a step from Point Break from my last post but this week I have been reminded of the quotation from John Updike “celebrity is a mask that eats into the face”. […]

Team working/digital literacy – win/win or lose/lose?

In the second of a series of articles, Helen Taylor (Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School) discusses some of the challenges of team working in an online learning environment. The move to an online synchronous module from a face to face teaching module (using SCALE Up methodologies) at a breakneck speed in a global pandemic […]

Using SCALE UP in law

Pamela Henderson led the spring Legal Education Group meeting by reporting on the challenges of adapting the SCALE UP model to the legal context. SCALE UP was designed by Bob Beichner in the USA as a response to the comparative passivity of the standard lecture and seminar module as then used in Physics.  As well […]