Develop Your Legal Skills With the Legal Practice Program
By Annabel Steele '25
If you’re applying to law school, you probably know at least a little bit about the kind of classes you’ll take as a first-year student—the doctrinal classes every law student takes across the country. But in addition to just knowing the law, it’s imperative that law students develop effective written and oral communication skills.
William & Mary Law School prioritizes these important practical skills from the very beginning of the 1L year. As part of the Law School’s Legal Practice Program, you’ll take courses on legal writing and important oral communication skills. Unlike the big doctrinal classes, you’ll take these courses with just the other members of your section. In my case, that means there are twelve of us taking these classes together.
Legal Research and Writing is a class that helps you learn how to write (and cite!) like a lawyer. You’ll have a full-time legal writing professor teach you how to analyze cases and write memos. The first memo of the semester (your teaching memo) is ungraded and due section-by-section over a period of a few months, so you get to gradually work on it until you’ve produced an entire memo. It made me feel a lot more confident about tackling my graded memo!
In addition to your legal writing professor, you’ll have a law librarian teach classes on legal research. These lessons will help you become more comfortable with Westlaw and LexisNexis so that you’re eventually ready to do your own research for memos. Plus, your 3L fellow will teach you about legal citations and the Bluebook (the legal citation system used by lawyers and courts).
The other half of the Legal Practice Program for 1Ls is the Lawyering Skills class. These classes are taught by adjunct professors; mine is a judge in the Williamsburg/James City County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. Your Lawyering Skills professor will teach you the oral communication skills you need for different legal practice scenarios like interviewing or counseling a client.
After you learn about the skills you need and watch a simulation between your professor and your 3L fellow, you get the chance to practice it yourself in an ungraded simulation. Your professor and fellow will give you a lot of feedback after your ungraded simulation. Then, at the end of the semester, you’ll get to show off your improvement in a graded simulation.
The Legal Practice Program continues into the second semester of 1L and even beyond. To learn more about all the courses in the Legal Practice Program, click here!