This book provides a bridge between academic and practical law. Its purpose is to introduce you to a set of highly transferable oral and written communication, group working, problem-solving and conflict resolution skills, and to develop them in a range of lawyering contexts: client interviewing, drafting, managing cases, legal negotiation and advocacy. The aims of this exercise are not to turn you, the reader, into a ready-formed legal practitioner, but:

• to help you develop a range of skills and attributes that will be useful to you in a variety of occupational settings;

• to enable you to experience and reflect critically on the problems and uncertainties of ‘real’ law, from the perspective of both lawyers and their clients;

• to enhance your understanding of the interplay between legal knowledge, skills and values in the lawyering process;

• to encourage and empower you to understand your own learning processes and to reflect critically upon them.

It is this dual emphasis on understanding lawyers' skills ‘in context’ – whereby our understanding is shaped by the contributions of socio-legal research into what lawyers do – and on reflection and critique which we believe distinguishes our ‘academic’ approach from the more functional emphasis of the vocational courses. At the same time we share with the vocational courses (and any undergraduate skills-based course for that matter) a belief that learning has to be grounded in doing. Skills are not acquired passively, but actively by experimentation and practice.