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This study examines the information practices of Israeli lawyers highlighting the central role that information plays in professional communities of practice. Examining the information practices of lawyers characterizes the information behavior of this community of practice.

Information practices are those recurrent practices related to actively seeking information for a variety of sources socially and contextually situated within members of a professional community. Twenty semi-structured interviews were carried out with lawyers in Israel that investigated the different ways by which lawyers interact with information in their professional work. Data collected in the interviews were analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

Findings from the content analysis of the interviews revealed three main themes: information assimilation, networking and self-promotion and content creation that encompass a wide variety of information practices related to seeking information related to a case, preparing and presenting a case, providing support for the client, collaborating with other members of the professional community and promoting their professional practice.

This study provides an innovating perspective of the ways by which an information-rich community of practice engages with information, solves problems, build social connections and creates new content.

The global Clinical Legal Education (CLE) movement transcends borders as law teachers worldwide try to inculcate law students and future legal practitioners with social justice values. One method of achieving this is through developing reflective practitioners. Kolb, finding common ground in the work of Lewin, Dewey, and Piaget, formulated the four stages in the experiential development of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experiment. Although Kolb’s model is used in legal education literature, students may not be provided with the relevant conceptual tools required to engage in reflective practice. This often results in students providing subjective analysis of their work, which fails to fully contribute to their educational experience. One of the reasons for omitting analytical tools is that reflective practice suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. According to Kinsella, the “concept remains elusive, is open to multiple interpretations, and is applied in a myriad of ways in educational and practice environments”. A further issue hindering reflective practice relates to Donald Schön’s critique of the positivist approach adopted by law schools.

This chapter will apply a human rights framework to CLE to develop reflective practitioners. The two main reasons for this are, first, human rights as formulated by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights are universal, interrelated, and indivisible and, second, reflection based on these universal human rights values will benefit cross-jurisdictional societies in assisting vulnerable clients affected by emerging implied and direct human rights challenges.

This research aims to extend the traditional cultural divide between male and female lawyers by examining contradictory workplace policies that discriminate against the work and education of female auxiliary workers within general legal practice in Australia.

The study uses membership categorisation devices, an ethnomethodological approach, to analyse two policy statements which are in common use in Australian legal practice.

The research finds that the statements, which are a merge of policy and procedures, are fundamentally contradictory. Whilst one prohibits and represses any discrimination against women, the other does not provide educational opportunities for employees, predominantly women, at the auxiliary level of employment. As a result female auxiliary workers are marginalised and their career prospects are diminished.

Policies guiding work and education in Australian legal practice reinforce a culture of gender‐based discrimination. It is argued that espoused policies need to reflect policies in action by providing career opportunities for women auxiliary workers.

The research challenges the notion that espousing a policy of equal opportunity leads to women receiving the same educational opportunities as men in Australian legal practice. The research shows the importance of understanding how job category has cultural and gendered meanings.

Institutional theorists treat law and regulations as external factors that is part of the organization’s environment. While institutional theory has been criticized for its inability to recognize the role of agents and to theorize agency, the growing literature on institutional work and institutional entrepreneurship, partially informed by and co-produced with practice theory, advances a more dynamic view of processes of institutionalization. In order to cope with legal and regulatory frameworks, constituting the legal environment of the organization, there are evidence of organizational responses in the form of bargaining, political negotiations, and decoupling of organizational units and processes. The purpose of this paper is to report how legal and regulatory frameworks both shape clinical practices while at the same time they are also informed by the activities and interests of professional communities and commercial clinics.

This paper reports an empirical study of the Swedish-assisted conception industry and is based on a case study methodology including the use of interviews and formal documents and reports issues by governmental agencies.

The empirical material demonstrates how scientists in reproductive medicine and clinicians regard the legal and regulatory framework as what ensures and reinforces the quality of the therapies. At the same time, they actively engage to modify the legal and regulatory framework in the case when they believe it would benefit the patients. The data reported presents one successful case of how PGD/PGS can be used to develop the efficacy of the therapy, and one unsuccessful case of regulatory change in the case of patient interest groups advocating a legalization of commercial gestational surrogacy. In the former case, scientific know-how and medicinal benefits served to “push” the new clinical practice, while in the latter case, the “demand-pull” of patient interest groups fails to get recognition in regulatory and policy-making quarters.

The study contributes to the literature on agency in institutional theory (e.g. the emerging literature on institutional work) by emphasizing how legal and regulatory frameworks are in a constant process of being modified and negotiated in the face of novel technoscientific practices and social demands. More specifically, this process include many scientific, technological, economic, political and social relations and resources, making the legal environment of organizations what is the outcome from joint negotiations and agreements across organizational and professional boundaries.

This chapter examines the efforts undertaken to restructure the legal education system in South Africa and Nigeria. It investigates the connection between contextual influences and professional development, particularly with respect to the concept of legal information literacy and the value of acquired educational skills in the context of legal practice. The chapter provides insights to the needs and challenges for graduate requirement for legal information literacy skills in the effort to ensure productivity in the legal education system in Africa. Data were obtained using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Outcomes from the study were supportive of the importance of information literacy as central to the development of professional competence. Findings also point to a need for greater collaboration between the legal education system and the legal profession in narrowing the gap between the teaching and practice of law specifically in the design and implementation of an information literacy framework for the legal education system.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current context, scope and problems in the provision of work-integrated learning (WIL) in legal education and how the adoption transformative pedagogies in WIL which is offered in legal education can foster personal and social transformation in addition to enhancing lawyering skills. The paper draws on learning from Australia, England and the USA.

The backdrop of this conceptual paper is WIL and transformative education. The text begins with a critique of existing WIL frameworks and practices in legal education in Australia, England and the USA. This exposes a focus on skills enhancement at the expense of social and personal transformation. Drawing on transformative learning, the paper proposes practices which can be used in WIL offered in legal education to enhance personal and social transformation.

There is very little literature on how legal education and WIL in legal education can enhance personal and social transformation. Tensions continue to exist between the predominant aim of instilling the legal skills necessary to ensure that graduates are prepared for legal practice through WIL programmes and between the need to simultaneously enhance critical consciousness and social transformation necessary for active participation in social and professional life.

More research is required on the best manner in which the ideals and practices of emancipatory education can be installed within WIL programmes so as to successfully reduce the tensions between the instilling of legal skills required to practice law and the need to train students to be holistic, critical and constructive thinkers.

The suggestions made in this paper provide a framework to adopt critical pedagogies in the provision of WIL in legal education. The theoeretical and practice-based suggestions presented in this paper are also relevant to other professional disciplines where personal transformation is desired.

The literature on legal education predominantly focuses on enhancing lawyering skills and competencies and there is an absence of the utilisation of transformative pedagogies in legal education generally and WIL offered in legal education. Drawing predominantly on the literature and practices relating to legal education in Australia and incorporating comparative insights from England and the USA, the paper contributes to the broader literature on transformative learning. Most significantly, the paper contributes specifically to the use of transformative pedagogies in WIL offered in legal education through the suggestion of practices relating to critical reflection and dialogue which are not commonly used in legal education.

The paper enriches the understanding of the principal challenges faced in future lawyers' education in Mexico considering global trends, particularly from the perspective of skills creation in diverse areas of legal practice.

The framework used draws on trends identified within an international collaborative research study in which both authors participated, titled “Developing a Blueprint for Global Legal Education”. This current paper stems from the premise that these recommendations can be further developed and better utilised if explored within a specific context. The methodology designed for this research consisted of two main components: a thorough analysis of the norms that regulate the education system and the professional practice in Mexico, and an extensive literature review that provided insights into the state of global trends in legal education.

This paper reveals that in Mexico having a well-designed and comprehensive legal framework is the first step to promote the creation of high-quality educational models.

The study analyses the current situation in Mexico within four global trends: (1) regulation of legal education and access to the profession; (2) building professional practice skills; (3) internationalisation of education and (4) incorporation of technology and responsible innovation.

The reflections are intended to promote better training of law students in the skills required to face the various challenges that the legal profession currently involves. This is under an approach that analyses global challenges and identifies the best practices to connect learning processes with in-demand professional skills.

This article sheds light on the legal services offered by antiviolence centers through a discursive practice-based analysis of women who have experienced domestic violence and the lawyers who volunteer in the center.

Using a practice-based framework, the article utilizes a case study of the first legal meeting between a lawyer and a woman who has experienced violence. The case study illustrates how the legal advisors' expertise is deployed in the use of “discursive practices” in dealing with women who have experienced domestic violence. Through a systematic analysis of the verbatim narrative, the case shows how the lawyer performs her legal help through expert “discursive practices” which are situated in recognition of the texture of practices experienced by women in the legal system.

The case study shows how a practice-based approach is able to account for lawyers' discursive and interactional knowledge in dealing with domestic violence. This expert doing and saying includes the ability to read the complexities of abusive situations, using “professional vision” to identify, highlight and codify clues and patterns of a partners' violent behavior; the mastery of “co-implication” with women to support the development of a narrative of the abuse as a crime recognizable both by the victim and the legal system.

The analysis shows that practice-based approaches to knowing and learning in investigating discourse practices can provide insights on practitioners' interactional expertise as well as the relevance of the service. While a close look at the actual practices illustrates the lawyer's interactional mechanisms, the crucial role of legal aid in the antiviolence center can be appreciated by contextualizing within the texture of practices that characterizes women's experiences with violence.

The Howard Shuttering Contractors case throws considerable light on the importance which the tribunals attach to warnings before dismissing an employee. In this case the tribunal took great pains to interpret the intention of the parties to the different site agreements, and it came to the conclusion that the agreed procedure was not followed. One other matter, which must be particularly noted by employers, is that where a final warning is required, this final warning must be “a warning”, and not the actual dismissal. So that where, for example, three warnings are to be given, the third must be a “warning”. It is after the employee has misconducted himself thereafter that the employer may dismiss.