New York Real Estate brokers and salesperson must do it for 22.5 hours every two years. New York lawyers and home inspectors are required to do it for 24 hours every two years. The "it" is continuing education. The more things change, the more important it is for licensees to learn what's new in their respective professions.
As New York paralegals are neither licensed nor certified, there is no governmental entity that requires legal assistants to engage in any form of educational endeavor, much less continuing education. Still, given the ever-changing substantive and technological environment of the legal profession, coupled with the vastly increasing responsibilities required of 21st century legal assistants, the need for Continuing Paralegal Education (CPE) is both real and glaring.
Consider, for instance, the general area of legal research. For most seasoned paralegals, learning to navigate Westlaw®, LexisNexis®, Loislaw® and other on-line legal research tools has been a seat-of-the-pants experience. An office technology time tracking product like Timeslips® was probably first introduced on the job, not in the classroom. Important areas like Consumer Bankruptcy and Mortgage Foreclosure have undergone a complete metamorphosis during the course of only the last few years. In short, as with all professional endeavors, knowledge and know-how slowly become stagnant, as nothing stays the same.
Unlike the traditional basic paralegal education, CPE is not an educational commitment measured in hundreds of hours or scores of credits. As the topic syllabi offered are highly specific, each CPE component is usually between 12 and 30 hours in length. The programs are also delivered without the need for prerequisite training, or even employment experience in the area. Many paraprofessionals use these brief seminars as a foray into an area of practice for which they possess little more than a keen interest and a desire to test the fertile waters of employment opportunity. Short, sweet, to the point ... and a means to an identifiable end.
A quality CPE program has two basic components: 1) a top-flight practitioner or jurist with the ability to balance intellectual discourse with pragmatic, day-to-day experiences; and, 2) a comprehensive set of materials that serve as both training manual and a future resource text for the student that later works in the area.
The Hofstra Paralegal Studies program offers high quality Continuing Paralegal Education (CPE), taught by our own Paralegal instructors. The next course, The Practice of Life Planning for the New York Paralegal, begins on November 16. Click here for more information.