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Set Out on Your Path at South Texas

Current and prospective students can learn about different career options in many legal fields, what it’s like to practice in those fields, and how to plan a curriculum to emphasize desired career goals.

About Pathways to Practice

South Texas College of Law Houston offers a wide array of courses to prepare you for the practice of law, including nearly 50 skills courses and other experiential learning opportunities, as well as hundreds of potential internships for credit. Both the breadth of courses and our longstanding emphasis on skills-based training provides students with unique opportunities to prepare themselves for practice in numerous legal fields.

Designing a curriculum that suits you among all these options, however, can be a daunting task without guidance. You need to understand how all of these course options and skills-based opportunities could coincide with your interests, strengths, and objectives. Indeed, you might even find that you are interested in legal fields and areas of practice that you didn’t even know existed (or only understood on a very general level).

Pathways to Practice is designed to help fill these gaps for current and prospective students. The professors here at STCL Houston have created pathways and accompanying materials for 16 different subjects. 15 of them concern specific areas or types of practice. The other subject is Texas Bar Examination.

We recommend that all students review the Texas Bar Examination materials, regardless of career interest. You will maximize the effectiveness of your curricular planning if you think early in your law school experience about the dual goals of passing the bar and obtaining your desired employment. South Texas provides numerous bar programs, materials, and resources for students throughout law school and even after graduation.

Additionally, your familiarity with the wide scope of courses tested on the bar examination will help you become well-rounded attorneys, as could many other STCL Houston courses not listed on the pathways. For this reason, the faculty recommends that you review the course catalog in its entirety and seek us out with any questions you might have—we’re here to help you.

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Pathways to Practice Components

The professors here at South Texas College of Law Houston have created pathways and accompanying materials for 16 different subjects.

Generally, each of the 16 subject matters has four components:

Below is a summary of each component. We encourage you to read the summaries, take the time to review the practice area descriptions, and discover your path.

Click the “+” icon for each summary to see additional information and frequently asked questions.

Subject Overview

The subject overview will explain how courses listed on the curricular pathway relate to practice.

The subject overview provides a summary of the practice of law in a given field, the subject matter expertise students must acquire to practice in that field, the relevant skills that will help students succeed, and other considerations that students thinking about practicing in that field should know.

Curricular Pathway

The curricular pathway provides a progression of courses offered at South Texas College of Law Houston that are relevant to an area of practice.

Students will rarely be able to take all the courses listed in a given pathway—nor should they. There are many specializations within a given practice area. Further, a pathway may list several relevant courses even though students can largely obtain the needed skills by taking just one of those courses. For this reason, it is important to consult the subject overviews where we try to explain the significance of each course when its relevance to particular career paths is not intuitive.

For most subjects, we lay out the pathways in three stages. The progression through the three stages takes into account whether the course is required, whether the course has any prerequisites, and how important or foundational the course is to the practice of law in that field. Nevertheless, courses may be particularly important to some specializations in a practice area but not others. For this reason, always make sure to consult the subject overview to fully understand the importance of a given class and the nature of the progression in a given pathway.

For select subjects, we believe that the regular three-stage progression is not ideal for curricular design. In those instances, the subject overview will explain how we organized the pathway.

Not necessarily. The progression of courses on the pathway is a recommendation for career training purposes. Students, however, must balance career development with the need to prepare for the bar exam by taking courses tested on the bar. Additionally, scheduling considerations could impact a student’s course selection process.

Please note that Legal Research & Writing (LRW) I and LRW II are not listed on the pathways because you can assume that the writing, research, and analytical skills taught in these courses are beneficial to every practice area. The pathways do not include Professional Responsibility for analogous reasons.

Law Faculty

The law faculty page provides the names and the courses on the pathway taught by both full-time and adjunct faculty. By clicking the name of the faculty member, you can view their contact information. If you have questions about a particular pathway after reading the materials, the listed faculty members are here to help you.

Resources

The resources page provides additional sources of information that students might find useful. These resources provide sources for additional information on the practice area in question and sources that will be of use in seeking employment in the specific field.

Questions? Contact Us

Interested in learning more about courses, co-curricular options, and admissions processes at South Texas? Complete this contact form to get in touch with an Admissions officer.

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