Paralegals Are Required to Have Formal Training

People who choose the paralegal profession usually have the following traits in common: They have good writing and verbal skills, they are intelligent, and they enjoy working with people. These characteristics are important because they are similar to what it takes to become a competent attorney.

A paralegal career is open to people with high school diplomas, legal secretarial experience, college degrees, or graduate degrees. It is important to choose the paralegal training program, which is appropriate to your prior educational background and the employment opportunities available in your geographic area.

 

There are no prescribed high school courses or particular college majors required for entrance into paralegal programs. However, the ability to communicate well both orally and in writing is important in your success as a paralegal student and ultimately in your career.

History, English, and foreign language courses are particularly useful in strengthening communication skills. Paralegal training programs should view the paralegal's role as similar to that of the lawyer and in the delivery of legal services.
In order for a paralegal to work effectively with an attorney, he/she must understand what an attorney does. Paralegal training programs should include in their curricula an overview of the activities in which a lawyer engages. Graduate paralegals will then have a basic understanding of the operation of a law office and have a better understanding of where and how they will fit into the legal community.

Prior to the inauguration of formal degree or certificate programs, paralegals were trained in-house. The in-house training programs for paralegals began on an ad hoc basis as the need for a paralegal developed. Usually it resulted from a small firm quickly expanding the scope of its practice, and wishing to train a competent legal secretary to perform paralegal duties. The legal secretary would then be able to incorporate his/her secretarial duties with the on-the-job paralegal training received from the lawyers.

The informal method of training a paralegal served the needs of a small law firm. But this kind of training is time-consuming for the attorney and can be haphazard.

Paralegals may be trained to perform certain tasks in the office, but they may not understand why. This can interfere with their ability to apply the same principles in another case. The forms put together to serve as a "training manual" for one type of case might not be applicable to another case; one office's forms might be totally inappropriate in another law office.

Nonetheless, legal secretaries were able to upgrade their positions with in-house paralegal training programs, and until formal programs developed, this was the only available education for paralegals. However informal this training may have been, it still offered a clinical education which provided the paralegal with the opportunity to integrate his/her training with legal experience.

Formal paralegal training began as the legal community recognized the need to provide a professional education to those people interested in working as legal assistants. The strong need for qualified paralegals developed in part from the need to provide less expensive legal services to clients and also to assist attorneys in an increasingly litigious society.