Today's DJ has a great letter to the editor from Bret Christensen of the Riverside County Law Library responding to the May 18 article
Bar proposes revised practice skills requirements:
The article did not say what skills on which the State Bar wants new
attorneys to focus, so might I offer a suggestion? I propose that in this
10-hour mix of "new attorney training" that the bar is proposing, law
students spend at least three hours at their local county law library to see
what exactly their local county law library has to offer.
All too often I'll see newly minted attorneys come into my law library with
nary a clue how to find anything in print. In fact, because many new students
are, sadly, never introduced or encouraged to use print resources, when they
get out of law school and pass the bar, I hear the same thing over and over:
"I never knew this existed!" Since they've spent countless hours
using online resources but hardly any print resources, they often can't even
distinguish between a table of contents and an index. And students who use
online resources exclusively generally only know how to use natural language
searching - which only taps about 15 percent of the full potential of online
resources.
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