All the Essentials About Paralegal Training

Paralegals are defined generally as people who are trained to perform certain legal work for attorneys-at-law without being qualified as lawyers themselves. That is the simple definition, but in fact different jurisdictions in the United States and elsewhere define paralegals differently.

To name one example, the American Bar Association defines a paralegal as performing “specifically delegated, substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible,” leaving the legal responsibility in the hands of the attorney himself. The United Kingdom Institute of Paralegals, on the other hand, defines a paralegal specifically as a non-lawyer who performs “legal work that previously would have been done by a lawyer, or if done by a lawyer, would be charged for.”

Essentially, a paralegal is the next best thing to a licensed attorney-at-law who is trained to be a legal assistant without quite being a qualified attorney. Perhaps the best unofficial definition of a paralegal is that he or she receives particular niche training to take on certain specified or specialized tasks, which come from an attorney’s analysis and strategy in a legal proceeding or trial, whereby the attorney is licensed and recognized officially to be able to analyze and create strategies in a legal case. Another way to phrase it might be that paralegal training is niche training as compared to the broader, deeper, and more formalized general training an attorney receives.

Paralegals work under the direct or the official supervision of attorneys-at-law. They are found in all areas of law, including criminal law, real estate law, tax law, business law, estate law, and even constitutional law. Their tasks customarily include interviewing and researching clients;  corresponding with clients and other attorneys involved in particular cases; organizing and maintaining client and case files; indexing and summarizing key documents and transcripts; preparing clients for court sessions; helping to run law libraries; reviewing published materials relevant to specialty areas of the law; keeping continuously-current court rules volumes;  researching procedural, administrative, and case law; and, following and analyzing pending or newly-passed local, state, and federal legislation that may affect an incumbent client or an active case.

Generally speaking, paralegals are usually competent in at least eight particular basic skills. They must be good communicators, since a considerable amount of their work involves acting as a liaison between his or her employing attorney and the clients, opposing lawyers, and any other parties involved in a legal matter. They must be good writers, especially since much of their work involves legal correspondence and documents, briefs, memorandum, record-keeping, and research analysis. They must be attentive researchers who can handle traditional and electronic research databases and libraries alike. They must have acute technology skills, particularly as the Internet and other modern electronic technology is now a well-embedded facet of just about every known law practice. They must be highly organized people who can bring reasonable order to an attorney’s web of cases and to the deep documentation, indexing, categorizing, and managing of all facets and information in those cases. They must be capable of multitasking; rarely will a paralegal have a single case to contend with, and even if he or she does there is no single disposal of even the simplest case: there is too much work to be done in terms of interviewing witnesses or litigants, communicating with clients or opponents, training colleagues on new databases or case law documentation, and keeping accurate and current records and documents. They must be above-average team workers, since the very nature of their work involves dealing with numerous people even on a single case, in and away from their employing attorneys’ practices. And, they must be detail-oriented to an acute degree; the attorney basically focuses on the bigger picture and leaves the smaller, and more numerous details to the paralegal.

A paralegal career can be a financially as well as a spiritually or intellectually rewarding career. As of 2007, American paralegals averaged about $53,000 per year, but the salaries fluctuated according to certain specialties. Salaries actually ran higher or slightly lower depending on whether the paralegal was employed through an attorney on corporate staff or by an attorney in private practice, and which legal specialty either attorney handled primarily. The lowest-salaried paralegals through 2007 were those involved in workers’ compensation, at $36,200 per year; the highest through 2007 were those involved in tax law, at $67,500 per year.

Paralegal training ranges from basic paralegal certification for those who hold degrees in other fields and take up to twelve months of paralegal training to those who earn two-year Associate’s degrees in paralegal studies and four-year Bachelor’s degrees in paralegal studies. Paralegal education typically includes torts and contracts, ethics, civil litigation, finance, marketing, criminal law, dispute resolution, legal research, legal applications of computers and, now, the Internet, legal writing and terminology, litigation assistance, and law office administration. The programs also offer internships in law firms, corporate legal departments, government agencies, and other organizations, with some including special courses preparing paralegal students for certification tests.

There are numerous schools and colleges offering paralegal education toward certification or accredited degrees, but some of these include several campuses of the University of California, Georgetown University, Aurora (Colorado) Community College, Marist College (New York), Syracuse University, Duke University, Pennsylvania College of Technology, and the University of San Diego. If you are interested in a paralegal career, you should research these and numerous other accredited schools and training centers to determine the best course for your paralegal education.

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