What You Can Expect to Learn in Your Online Paralegal Program

Paralegal Certificate Course

CLS by BARBRI Paralegal Certificate Course begins with an introduction to the American legal system. We’ll go over things like court structure, jurisdiction, venue, the importance of precedents, and the rules of civil procedure. This helps lay a foundation for later lessons that cover more advanced concepts. Following lessons include ethics, a discussion of the rules of evidence, and legal investigation, legal research, legal writing, legal document preparation, legal analysis, and citation format.

The course focuses on practical application, and students will actually prepare several items, just like they would in a law office. You will draft discovery documents, like requests for admissions, or requests for derogatories. You’ll also prepare several interoffice memoranda, and your final writing assignment will be an appellate brief.

We also provide in depth training on using the online Legal Research Database Westlaw Next, and you’ll have several research assignments that will allow you the opportunity to hone your research skills. We also include an in depth discussion of the proper citation format, and all of your legal citations are critiqued throughout the course to ensure that you’re doing it accurately and factually.

Advanced Paralegal Certificate

The Advanced Paralegal Certificate Course offered by CLS by BARBRI picks up where the core paralegal certificate left off. It assumes you got all the basic most important skills, you can issue SPAs, you can find law, you know all about legal research, legal writing, you can do legal analysis, and it takes these skills and focuses them on different areas of law. The Advanced Paralegal Course has 15 different substantive law topics that students can choose from. Students need to choose any 6 in order to receive a certificate of completion.

The nice part about this is, is that they can choose whichever topics meet their career and educational needs. If you know that you want to work in criminal law, you can gear your topic choices based around that specific area of law. We have course topics on Advanced Legal Research, Alternative Dispute Resolution and Mediation, as well as Bankruptcy Law, Business Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure. We also have topics on Estate Planning, education Law, Family Law, Immigration Law, Intellectual Property Law, Real Property Law, Victim Advocacy, and Water Law. There are several different areas that students can gain valuable knowledge and skills in.

Again, the course is practice-oriented. We want practical application, so in family law, you’re going to prepare a marital separation agreement. In estate planning, you might be asked to prepare a will or a trust. Each of the substantive law areas provides an opportunity for you to hone your skills in that particular area of law, and the fact that you can customize which topics you take to get your certificate allows you to tailor your education to meet your needs.