Leipold Reviews Hamilton's Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide To Meaningful Employment

James G. Leipold (Senior Advisor, Law School Admission Council), There Are No Shortcuts, But the Road Is Getting Shorter (reviewing Neil Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar), Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide to Meaningful Employment (ABA Books 3d ed. 2023)):

Neil Hamilton continues to distill his roadmap for law students into ever more streamlined guidance on how to transform themselves from law students to fully fledged lawyers.

Hamilton’s third edition of his Roadmap: The Law Student’s Guide to Meaningful Employment (ABA Books, summer 2023), is a complete revision of the second edition, wherein he has wisely condensed the work from 224 pages to fewer than 50 pages to make it even more accessible to busy law students.

This new work is more akin to a workbook, with short sections of text followed by templates that law students can readily use and adapt for their own purposes, and frankly, templates that law school career services professionals can readily use and adapt for their own purposes.

The central mission of the workbook is to guide students through four essential developmental practices that are indispensable steps on the successful journey from student to professional. ...

Roadmap is a generous contribution to both law students and the law student professional identity formation movement. Hamilton and his colleagues at the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, namely Jerry Organ and Louis Bilionis, have been generous in sharing their important work with the legal education community.

They continue to run real time field research with their students at St. Thomas, report their findings, and build responsive student professional development resources to share with the community. Currently they are building a “One File” coordinated coaching information system where all of a student’s coaches, mentors and supervisors can contribute assessments and feedback in one place — a resource they intend to make available to all law schools.

In Hamilton’s own words, “the key first step in professional identity formation is for each student to take ownership of her own professional development.” This third edition of Roadmap is as good and as straightforward and user-friendly a guide to that first step as exists. “It is tailored to foster each student’s growth toward ownership over their professional development and progress toward the goals of bar passage and meaningful post-graduation employment,” Hamilton writes. I agree with him, and I recommend the book for law students and law student professional identity and career services professionals alike.