In these challenging markets, each student needs to synthesize his or her life experience with his or her law school experience into a biographical coherence or story about how his or her unique strengths and skills can serve others well in meaningful employment. The Roadmap guides each student through this process.

Faculty, staff, and alumni need to work together to help each student internalize a career-long commitment to professional development toward excellence in the competencies needed to serve others well. The Roadmap is a creative co-educator approach to help each student ‘connect the dots’ between this commitment to professional development and the student’s goal of meaningful employment. The Roadmap is really terrific and a huge contribution to professional formation for law students.

I wish I had something like the Roadmap in law school to help me understand all the competencies needed to be successful in the practice of law and how to use the curriculum and other experiences of law school to develop the needed com-petencies. I think the one-on-one coaching to help each student think through his or her plan to develop toward meaningful employment to serve others well is exceptionally valuable.

Professor Hamilton’s important research and new book raise awareness of a common misperception. We often believe that smart, driven students are also automatically self-directed learners when it comes to selecting a career path and preparing to be successful professionals. While the majority is interested in exam-ining possible career paths, most lack the tools to act on that interest. For their part, legal employers have not been transparent on the full range of competen-cies needed for professional success, thus creating a “secret memo” challenge for applicants and new lawyers to try to figure out on their own what is needed to achieve success. Hamilton’s Roadmap gives students that secret memo, so to speak, and involves them in active career planning toward all the needed competencies at an early stage. Combined with support from professors, professional development administrators, and career counselors working in concert, the Roadmap has proved to lead to more self-directed learning for law students. This is good for students, law schools, legal employers, and the profession at large.

The Roadmap is an incredible compilation, packed full with both the pragmatic, real-world needed skills for a student to develop toward meaningful employment and the needed skills to serve all those whom we as lawyers take an oath to serve. A law student should be presented with this resource on the first day of his or her law school education, and it should be read and reread frequently not just until the end of law school but throughout a lawyer’s career. Everybody comes out the winner by reading this excellent work: lawyer-to-be, the employer, the practicing lawyer, the clients we serve, and anyone who cares or needs to know more about what it means to be a competent, ethical, and professional lawyer.