This book provides a comprehensive descriptive and prescriptive treatment of legal counseling, interviewing, and negotiation (including mediation and plea-bargaining). As reflected in the title, the book takes "a practical approach" to these skills, so students can learn specifically how to engage in effective counseling and negotiating. The book also emphasizes pertinent ethical and legal considerations in connection with counseling clients and negotiating settlements. The authors discuss leading "theoretical approaches" to the extent those approaches can be meaningfully applied in practice. The overall effect is to emphasize that blend of theory, practice, ethics, and law that is most meaningful in the sense of having real-life application to effective client representation.

The Appendices to the book provide numerous negotiation and mediation, including plea-bargaining, role-plays. Interviewing and counseling role-plays are provided in a separate Teacher's Manual (available only to professors), which also includes the "confidential instructions" for the negotiation, mediation, and plea bargaining role-plays.

This book also is available in a three-hole punched, alternative loose-leaf version printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper with wider margins and with the same pagination as the hardbound book.