Legal
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Law School Isn't the Only Way to Become a Lawyer
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With tuition and fees at a private law school approaching $50,000 annually, it's enough to dissuade those without the time or money from even applying. But in some places, there's another path to becoming an attorney.
California, Vermont, Virginia and Washington allow individuals who have gone through an apprenticeship to take the bar exam and, if they pass -- no easy feat -- become full-fledged lawyers.
That's how Marilyn Skoglund became ...
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Handbook Tips For a Professional Services Firm
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Creating and updating employee handbooks -- the policies and procedures manuals every business with more than just a few employees should have -- are not the fun part of office management. But keeping them up-to-date is critical. And that goes doubly for law firms, where employees are held to especially high standards of compliance and ethics.
Law office managers -- and managers of any professional services firm -- need to ensure that their handbooks ...
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Paralegals Need to Be Leaders
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Paralegals are more than support staff for the legal profession. They are leaders and need to start acting like one.
“Paralegals are the backbone of our legal community. They run our courtrooms, our law firms, our in-house legal departments. Without them we'd miss deadlines and have shoddy research. I believe that assuming a leadership role is essential for their professional and personal success," says Zachary Zaharek, Division Vice President ...
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The Fierce Texas Fight to Hire Lawyers
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A lawsuit between two Texas recruiting firms has offered a look at the fierce employment market in the Lone Star State for experienced attorneys.
Detailed in an article in Law.com, the courthouse battle pitted a legal recruiting specialist against a firm specializing in placing attorneys. The specifics of the lawsuit are complicated, but essentially have to deal with a fee-splitting arrangement with more than a million dollars at stake ...
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Lawyers, Scientists: The Loneliest of the Professionals
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Lawyers and STEM professionals may be good earners, but they are the most at risk of feeling lonely. A study of 1,624 workers of a broad cross-section of occupations found lawyers, engineers and scientists were the loneliest, a finding that matches up with other studies of depression. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked these professions among those with the highest rates of suicide. (Farming, fishing and forestry ...
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Here's a Legal Profession That Doesn't Require Law School
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TV legal dramas have enticed more than a few people to consider becoming lawyers, only to discover that it's a long slog from classroom to courtroom. If spending 3 years studying your way through law school, then several more grinding away until you get your first trial isn't for you, there is an alternative: Become a paralegal.It's a profession that US News says is "a great ...
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How Support Staffs Can Survive As Law Firms Retrench
Read the rest of this entry »With BigLaw firms now playing follow the leader to up starting salary for first year lawyers, legal assistants, paralegals and other support staff are worrying they'll be laid off to balance the budget.
It's a not unreasonable fear. Law firms have begun offering severance packages and some have simply fired support staff, though so far, the largest layoff has been in the United Kingdom.
If you are one ... -
Paralegals Taking On Work Of First Year Associates
With law firms under the gun over hourly billings paralegals are being asked to take on more responsibilities, including tasks once assigned to new associates.Read the rest of this entry »
Citing a survey about law firm staffing, The Legal Intelligencer says 38% of firms are shifting work from lawyers to their paraprofessionals; among larger firms, those with more than 250 attorneys, the percentage is even higher -- 42%.
One of the consequences of the trend is ... -
The Challenges of E-Discovery
E-discovery may have made the tedious pre-trial review of documents simpler, but the technology that powers it hasn't come without a price.Read the rest of this entry »
Attorneys in big cases have long yearned for a solution that enables them to quickly see connections among the different pieces of evidence they collect in depositions and pre-trial discovery. Technology has delivered. With a few keystrokes, attorneys can find inconsistent statements, reorganize documents and filter for ... -
Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys. Or Lawyers
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When Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson told mammas not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys, it was mostly good advice.
In 2014, there were about 930,000 jobs for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers, which is about as detailed as the government gets for this profession. Most of them are self-employed, working their own land. The numbers will decline, but only a little.
That advice about ...
