Legal Practice, Professional Doctorate

The programme has been designed to provide those who work in the broad area of the public and human service professions an opportunity to study part-time for a doctorate. Course overview

After the Legal Services Act 2007, how do you stand out from the crowd?

A professional doctorate is a research degree designed for those in professional practice to deepen their understanding and engagement with practice. You may be interested in conventional legal doctrinal research, perhaps in a practice-based area such as funding of litigation; or the law in action in areas such as insolvency law or legal education by rigorous socio-legal data collection and analysis.

In the NTU programme, you will also have the additional advantage of working with and sharing discussion with colleagues from other disciplines, principally social practice and education for additional and unusual insight into their own work and working practices. Exposure, in this multi-disciplinary setting, to challenging theoretical frameworks; philosophies and forms of enquiry is intellectually stimulating and personally inspiring.

A suitable research project for the professional doctorate will have a close relationship with your own practice and identity as a lawyer. It may involve investigating or implementing change, at an organisational or wider level. It will involve you in making decisions about what and how to research, and in exploring the implications of that research, not only for your practice, but for yourself. Consistently with the approach used successfully by Nottingham Law School for almost twenty years, you will be encouraged to engage in a process of continuous reflection on yourself, your practice and your research throughout the programme. We expect you to become expert in your chosen field of investigation, developing and demonstrating your autonomy and confidence as a researching professional through discussion, reading and research investigation.

The aims of the programme are to:

• Provide students with an opportunity to explore both the complex relationships between knowledge, theory and practice, and also the intricate nexus of understanding the world and changing it.
• Develop students' ability to design and implement a research project at the boundaries of knowledge of their professional and educational fields.
• Provide students with an opportunity to develop their judgement, foresight and problem analysis by applying theoretical and philosophically tuned forensic skills to the research material derived from their investigations.
• Provide students with an opportunity to develop as both reflective and reflexive practitioners who have the intellectual and personal adaptability to be able to deal with the complexities of organisational change and ambiguity.
• Provide students with an opportunity to develop communication skills which enables participants to communicate effectively with both academics and practitioners from the world of education and the communities in which people live, and to act as mediators between the constituencies involved.

In order to meet these aims the programme of study has been structured around the process of research.

Admission to the programme will be by application and interview. International students are welcome (subject to English language requirements). You do not have to be a qualified lawyer to achieve the D Legal Prac award, but should be involved in some form of legal practice, e.g. in the in-house, academic (including vocational), regulatory or not-for-profit sectors.

Contact details
Research Administrator (ProfDs)
Business, Law and Social Sciences
Graduate School
Nottingham Trent University.
Telephone: +44 (0)115 848 8117
Email
Nottingham Law School website

The Professional Doctorate in Legal Practice involves students in two formal elements of activity: workshops and supervision of their own research projects.

Workshops
You will attend three to four two-day workshops, in Nottingham, in each of the first three years of your study. These are co-taught with the Prof Doc in Education and Prof Doc in Social Practice and deal with topics that are generically relevant to research at doctorate level. Each workshop or group of workshops is linked to a specific stage in the project.

Your research project
Unlike the PhD, which is assessed by a single thesis delivered at the end of the project, the professional doctorate structure involves students in shaping their research project around a sequence of documents, the first four of which are submitted and assessed during the first three years of the project (and you should project manage your time accordingly). You are not required to undertake empirical data collection (eg by questionnaire or interview) as part of your Prof Doc Legal Practice project, but you may do so, and your Prof Doc Education and Prof Doc Social Practice colleagues will often do so. This useful document describing different kinds of legal research.

Structure
The course is structured in phases over, a minimum three-year period.

Year One
Document One (5,000 words) – a research proposal setting out the research question or questions, the professional context, how the question or questions will be investigated and any ethical issues.
Document Two (15, 000 words) – a literature review analysing the professional and academic literature on the subject, together with literature on the methodology of your enquiry.

Year Two
Document Three (15,000 words) – a research report on a small study that informs your overall research question. This may involve, for example, a pilot study, an investigation of a subsidiary issue that informs the main research question or an investigation with a particular constituency.
Document Four (15,000 words) – a second research report on a small study that informs your overall research question. This should contrast with Document Three in some way, for example by methodology, constituency, or by looking at a different subsidiary issue.
The results of both documents will lead into and inform the final thesis

Students who exit at this stage, having successfully completed the first four documents, will normally be eligible for an MPhil award. Students who choose to progress will be required to write a proposal for research in year three (including reflections from years one and two) as a basis for a short viva voce examination.

Year Three onwards
Document Five (30,000 words) – is the main thesis which answers your overall research question. It will draw on the previous documents but is likely to contain additional literature analysis and may include additional investigation.
Document Six (5,000 words) – a reflective report on your experiences and development as a researcher.

These are assessed by viva voce examination, involving an external and an internal examiner.

Students are also encouraged to form cross-disciplinary study circles of their peers for mutual support.