Methodology, Interview with Professor & Limitations

Methodology

To carry out this project, we carried out two surveys targeting Law undergraduates and graduated Law students, as well as two interviews with a NUS Law Professor and an employer respectively. Both surveys were created using surveymonkey.com. Results from both surveys would be presented during our oral presentation.

Interview with NUS Professor

The rationale behind the interview with employers was to understand the level of importance of the various communication skills in the work field. We forwarded a list of questions to various law firms and request that they answer the interview questions so as to help us understand the communication skills of lawyers from a different perspective. The second phase was to conduct an interview with a NUS professor that teaches communication skills in the law school. Through this, we would be able to find out how the teaching unit in the law faculty prepare NUS law students for their future careers. Similarly, we sent out a list of questions to various professors that are currently teaching in the NUS law school. However, only some of the professors replied and all of the professors that replied did not come from the legal writing department. Hence, they were unable to give us more information of how the communication skills in the law curriculum were taught. We had to rely on secondary sources such as module information to help us gain insight of the module’s curriculum.

Limitations

The pitfalls which were encountered whilst carrying out the survey were the insufficient contacts for us to carry out an extensive survey. Thus, the results of the survey can only be shown true for a certain population of law students. Our potential respondents emails were taken off the NUS Law student exchange website as well as contacts given to us from friends who are currently studying in the law faculty. Hence our sampling was not randomised. Secondly, we had to ensure that the questions were structured in such a way that it would not seem loaded or leading, if not the results would be biased
Small scale survey results, does not represent the whole NUS population in the law faculty. However, this proposal was meant to propose for further in-depth research thus our surveys targeted only small groups of respondents.