Danon Pritchard is Director of Digital Literacies at The City Law School and you’ll see a regular column from her on Lawbore: Digital Brief. This will be a mixture of guidance pieces, interviews and event reviews all related to digital skills and tech in the legal world.

The speed of change in this sphere can be a bit intimidating, so we’re delighted to host these pieces with the aim of getting you interested and keeping you updated. In this first piece of the 2025/26 academic year, Danon kicks off with the basics…

The start of the new academic year is the perfect time to put in place good digital working practices to support your studies. As a law student, you’ll need digital communication and collaboration skills to work with peers and lecturers – as well as supporting your learning, these skills are highly valued by employers, particularly in the legal sector.

Online platforms

At university, you’ll need to get used to using a range of different online tools and platforms for your learning, and becoming digitally agile across various platforms is an important skill in any workplace. For example, HM Courts & Tribunals Service’s ‘Common Platform’ is a single digital case management system, accessible by various stakeholders in the criminal justice system – you can hear interviews with users about the impact of the platform in this HMCTS podcast ‘Justice Connected: Inside the Common Platform’.

If you are a student at The City Law School, you’ll access many digital platforms including the Student Hub and Moodle (our Virtual Learning Environment) and you can use the free Moodle App to engage with your learning on-the-go (Apple App Store or Google Play).

Email

Whilst email might not be your preferred mode of online communication, at university and in the legal workplace, it is often one of the main methods of formal communication. Poor email practises can create digital overload, making it difficult for you to work out what is most important for you to read. When that happens, you might feel like disengaging with your inbox, which risks you missing key information. In legal practice, managing your digital correspondence effectively is crucial – if done badly, there can be professional conduct implications.

There are some easy ways to tackle email overload, and it just takes a bit of initial planning. You can link and manage multiple email accounts which means that you only need to access one platform to check your messages across multiple accounts. You can use AI to help manage your inbox, use a folder structure to organise email messages, calendars, contacts and tasks, or even use more advanced features such as ‘Rules’ to automate the management of email when it lands in your inbox.

To master email as a mode of communication, it’s important that you get into the habit of checking your inbox and folders regularly and that you use a adopt a suitably formal and professional tone which reflects social conventions (use ‘Reply all’, ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ with caution!).

Video conferencing platforms

You may have used Zoom or Teams socially or for learning during lockdown, but did you know that the functionality of these digital communication tools constantly improves and evolves? Being a confident online presenter is highly marketable skill and can also improve your performance in video-based recruitment exercises.

These skills are directly relevant to legal practice, where lawyers routinely interview clients remotely, and some court hearings are conducted online via specialist platforms – you can find out more in HMCTS’ guidance on their Remote Participation Approach. Being aware of the range of functionalities offered by a tool and investing time to practise using it in advance can help you to feel more confident when presenting online. Take advantage of any opportunities you can to practise, such as in online workshops or when running online events for societies.

Are you in the cloud?

As a university student, you are likely to have institutional access to cloud storage (if you are at City St George’s, you have free access to O365 and OneDrive – these are ‘industry standard’ tools in legal practice, so it’s worth getting used to using them) or you may already use a tool such as Google Drive.

Rather than saving your files locally to your laptop or desktop hard drive, files stored ‘in the cloud’ stored remotely and securely. This can be a game changer in terms of streamlining how you work and access your files, and it can also make document collaboration (where multiple users can share links to documents or work on the same document in real time) and co-authoring of files easy. Document collaboration is routinely used in legal practice, so it is worth investing time now to develop these skills. Goodbye to the days of being tied to a single device or worrying about accidentally deleting an important document from your desktop!

Training and support?

If you are a student at The City Law School, you can find more information and signposting to support in the Digital Skills section of The Digital CLS Student Moodle module. LinkedIn Learning is an excellent source of training videos (students at City St George’s have free access) and organisations such as Microsoft and Google provide free learning resources (including short video tutorials) to support use of their tools.