Continuing Para-Legal Education
Posted: September 21st, 2007
By: Zach Heller
Category: CLE Programming, Opinion Corner

Lawyers and law firms today are growing and competing in a rapidly changing legal environment. The drive to gain clients, work on bigger cases, and continue to deliver faster and higher quality service is increasing. This makes the jobs of paralegals and legal assistant ever more important. With this in mind, it is no wonder why more and more law firms are requiring that their paralegals take some form of continuing legal education.

Continuing legal education for non-lawyers is becoming popular for a number of reasons. First, law firms realize the value of more knowledgeable assistants. They can take on more responsibility on certain cases dealing with laws that they are familiar with. And especially withan increase knowledge of ethics, there is greater trust with access to important and many times confidential documents.

Secondly, it encourages the paralegals to take on more of an active role within the firm. When these assistants realize that learning about different aspects of the law can help drive their careers, they become focused on increasing their own knowledge and expertise. It motivates them to work harder on cases when they understand completely the processes that are taking place.

All around, continuing legal education for paralegals seems to be a win-win situation. It is no wonder why many of the larger firms have already started to introduce CLE to their assistants. It is anticipated that this will become more commonplace in the future and may one day become a mandatory requirement.

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Comments
Paralegals in my dad's firm are already required to take ethics courses every year to stay with the firm. He says it is worth the extra time and cost of training to keep them as up to date as possible.
Comment By: Halogen PC - September 24, 2007