First Year Legal Skills Program

To increase focus on the law as well as practical training, Pace Law School has redesigned the First Year Legal Skills Program to prepare first-year students in the critical lawyering skills of interviewing, counseling, writing, advocacy and negotiating. Professor Jill I. Gross, Director of Legal Skills, oversees the entire program, along with Peter Widulski, Assistant Director of First Year Legal Skills, who handles the day-to-day aspects of the program and teaches several sections.

Students will take this 5-credit, 2-semester course in small sections of approximately 20 students. Adjunct Professors of Legal Skills will teach a unified curriculum covering case synthesis, case analysis, fact-gathering, informative/predictive writing, client interviewing and counseling, legal research, persuasive writing, and oral and written appellate advocacy. Our highly-trained team of reference librarians will teach students how to conduct print and electronic research, and how to use proper citation form.

Writing Specialist
In order to properly train our students to become better writers and to make them more competitively employable, Pace employs a Writing Specialist.  Our Writing Specialist helps our students with grammar, mechanics, usage, and syntax.   She is available to meet with students for private conferences where she helps them improve the quality of their writing.  She also conducts numerous writing workshops over the course of the year where she addresses common writing mistakes and areas where students need refreshing and reinforcement, including grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and editing for brevity.  Our Writing Specialist also meets with students for whom English is a second language and helps them conform their writing to the particular demands of the English language. Additionally, our Writing Specialist assists students in perfecting their writing samples, an important part of job applications.   To schedule an appointment, you can contact our Writing Specialist, Tamar Gribetz, at tgribetz@law.pace.edu.

Adjunct Professors of Legal Skills:
Carol Barry
Francis Carroll
Elissa Germaine
Tamar Gribetz, Writing Specialist
Samantha Noda
Danielle Shalov
Margaret Regan Smith
Diane Webster
Peter Widulski, Assistant Director of First Year Legal Skills

Research Instructors in Legal Skills:
Vicky Gannon
Jack McNeill
Lucie Olejnikova
Cynthia Pittson
Taryn Rucinski
Gail Whittemore