VI. CONCLUSION

This article hopes to raise awareness of the many challenges in making the transition from law school research to practice research and to seek new opportunities in the law school curriculum for providing advanced research instruction. Clinical courses provide unique opportunities for law students to gain experience with and appreciation of the complexity of information seeking, analysis, and application skills in a practice setting. Much of the difficulty and frustration with practitioner legal research can be attributed to inexperience in managing the abundance of material that is available and the tendency to be overwhelmed by it. Librarians with good teaching skills possess the knowledge, expertise, and empathy to make research less mysterious and forbidding. There is much more to practitioner research than traditional legal research. This article recommends that clinicians and librarians work together to develop customized research instruction modules in the classroom portion of the clinic. In this collaboration, the clinical professor knows common and complex questions students will need to research in a clinical setting; librarians know how to shape those questions into a research instruction plan.