What is a Paralegal?
Paralegals can also be found under the names Legal Service Assistant, Litigation Analyst, Legal Analyst, Certified/Licensed Paralegal.
Paralegal experts perform delegated legal work which is in fact an ultimate of a lawyer. Paralegals have various asks They perform a variety of tasks including organizing and maintaining files, documents, and conducting deep legal research. Paralegals work in all sorts of companies and organizations, but mostly in various law firms, corporate legal departments, or government agencies.
What does a Paralegal do?
Paralegals perform great variety of duties, including direct help to the lawyer in every aspect of their cases; they conduct researches for cases; lion’s share of their job is connected to organization and maintenance of the office and its schedule (this is why many paralegals also finish some business courses, like CCBST business analyst course, to have deeper knowledge of the business maintenance); they write reports and prepare data for the trials while also communication with the clients.
The main idea of a paralegal’s job description is to help the lawyers in pretty much anything required from making coffee to communication with the judges. Lawyers remain the heads of the cases and responsible for their conduction, but paralegals are their hand in terms of any preparation step for the trial.
But the situation above is described for paralegals working directly with lawyers. For paralegals working in law firms or different organizations the duties will be shorter and easier. As a rule, paralegals working in some big corporations and organizations do not work on one entire case but perform the same part of the case procedure with any case of a company. In this case duties are much easier but at the same time less interesting.
In the beginning of a paralegal’s career you will have not many duties and most of them will be routine. If you would like to do more interesting and different job, you will have to specialize in different areas. For instance you can choose several from this list: corporate law, litigation, criminal law, employee benefits, personal injury, intellectual property, immigration, bankruptcy, real estate or family law, etc. Furthermore, over the time with valuable experience in the field paralegals can get better positions for supervisory responsibilities.
How healthy is the market for paralegals?
If you check the statistics, you will see that the rating of the paralegal job position continues to grow and is expected to be 17% higher by 2022. Today many young people start their legal careers from the positions of paralegals so be ready to strong competition in this field.
Is there advice for paralegal students?
If you are seriously planning to become a paralegal then first of all you need to choose a healthy and perspective area of the law, and secondly finish any CCBST Paralegal Training Course to get a certificate. Any certificate or diploma will be beneficial for you and raise your chance to get a desired position. Once you get the job, make yourself irreplaceable to gain more experience and insider’s knowledge as much as possible.
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