Would You Make A Good Law Paralegal?
If you think you'd like to work in the legal field, but don't have the money to spend on three years of law school, you may find a career as a law paralegal highly rewarding. While the responsibility for providing legal counsel to a client ultimately rests with a licensed attorney, many law offices depend on the services of law paralegals to assists their attorneys with almost every facet of their cases. Attorneys use law paralegals, or legal assistants, to assist their preparations for trials, depositions, settlement conferences, real estate closings, and legal hearings. Law paralegals are often asked to draft wills, trust, contracts, and other legally binding documents, and to help with estate planning. They must be able to perform legal research, serve subpoenas, locate witnesses, file legal documents, and obtain affidavits.
Being a law paralegal also requires superior office skills, like knowledge of word processing, spreadsheets, and recordkeeping. Law paralegals need excellent communications skills and the ability to perform preliminary interviews with clients, in order to determine what sort of legal assistance will best serve them. They need to be extremely detail-oriented, with a clear working knowledge of civil and criminal court procedures, both at the local, state, and Federal levels. A missed filing date can render months of intensive case preparation useless. Paralegals can choose the area of law in which to specialize; there are probate law paralegals; family law paralegals; criminal law paralegals; and with the increasingly aging population, a new field of elder-care law paralegals. But the training for a career as a law paralegal most often takes place at a community college offering an associate degree in paralegal studies. These programs normally require two years to complete. For those who want to fast-track their entry in to the legal world, however, there are some certificate programs in law paralegal studies which require that their enrollees only have a high school diploma or equivalent. Such programs usually last form six to nine months. On the other end of the spectrum are the four-year college law paralegal programs leading to Bachelor's Degrees in paralegal studies. If you decide to pursue a law paralegal certificate or degree, you can expect learn various legal research techniques and can tailor your courses to focus on the area of law in which you would like to specialize. Your ultimate job duties will depend to a great degree on the size of the law firm for which you go to work. If you are hired by a small or medium sized law office, with between one and five attorneys, you will probably be used more for your overall legal knowledge and asked to do research in a variety of areas and interview clients with differing legal needs. If, however, you are working in a large firm, a corporation, or a government agency, you will probably be assigned to one or two attorneys who specialize in a specific area of law. There is no doubt that the need for qualified law paralegals will continue to grow as more and more legal firms seek ways to lower their expenses, and your opportunity to break into this exciting field is better than it has ever been! |
