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hello everyone and welcome to the paralegal certificate course informational webinar from the center for legal studies we'll get started here in just a minute to allow some time for all of our attendees to join us our webinar today will start with a presentation from our business development director at the center for legal studies stephanie elio following the presentation we'll be here for about 15 minutes to answer your questions all about the course and the paralegal career field so please be sure to drop your questions in the q a feature and either one of our enrollment counselors working in the background here will get back to you directly or will address it during the live q a with that i'm going to introduce stephanie from the center for legal studies who will get our presentation started today take it away stephanie thank you emily good evening and welcome we want to thank you all for joining us tonight we are here together to learn about the center for legal studies paralegal certificate course we're going to set a few ground rules as we do for every webinar really quick we do have a tech team in the background and they're happy to be answering your questions as i present a lot of information tonight when you submit a question please make your questions relevant be kind they'll get to as many as they can we'll also have that live q a at the end so tonight we're going to talk about the center for legal studies as a whole so you understand who we are the courses how the instructors and peer interaction works in our online format we're going to talk about the schedules for courses the outlook for the career itself in working as a paralegal what that earning potential looks like how we work with college and university partners throughout the country and of course the cost and the materials involved how to enroll etc so we're gonna dive right in the center for legal studies was founded in 1980 we are just rounding out our 40th year which we are very proud to be a part of this industry we work with approximately 170 college and universities at this point in time we work directly with the continuing education and professional studies departments at those schools what we specialize in is training legal support staff and we do work very hard to maintain the most affordable and flexible training anywhere to be found we prac we focus very much on practical applicable skills so this really is job skills training when you take a program here and finish you're ready to go to work when you're done we've got a multitude of courses that we offer tonight we are all here to talk about the paralegal certificate but we do have other courses as well such as legal nurse consultant legal investigator we do software essential training for all those different software systems that are utilized in a legal office if you want to see other courses you can certainly go to our website all of our curriculum regardless of which course you're taking or looking into it is all designed and updated on a regular basis to remain on pace with whatever's going on in the current industry our online courses are done in what's called an asynchronous virtual classroom basically what that means for you is this course is instructor led and you've got classmates it's really very user friendly you have 24 7 access to the portal while your class is in session there are video and printed tutorials for you it's extraordinarily easy to navigate our instructors are there to assist we also have admin teams that work with our students as far as the administrative work that may need to be done or if you need some technical support on our website if you have never taken one of our online classes before you could go in and take a little sample just on the student login tab at the top of our web page it'll give you a video and kind of give you a little hint and kind of a showcase of what goes on in that virtual classroom we've got a couple slides in this presentation tonight that will show you as well but the most important thing is 24 7 our students are busy and we know that you've got jobs you've got families lots of things going on in your life so the course is 100 online you never physically have to go to the campus and you never physically have to be logged in at any particular time of day or day of the week our courses are instructor led and you've got opportunities to interact with the classmates not only are they instructor-led i want to talk a little bit about who the instructors are the center for legal studies employs to teach our courses people that are current in the industry these are licensed attorneys or extremely high ranking paralegals that have no less than 10 years experience in the field and they are still current in the field in addition to having teacher teaching experience when you get into the course you're going to see that there are discussion forums there's email tools to communicate with not only the instructor but also your classmates the bulletin board assignments that are given on a weekly basis are part of your grade so that participation is required but just like the rest of the class you're not required to log in at a specific time of day so for instance the instructor will post what the written and reading assignments are on monday morning typically deadlines would typically be sunday night an instructor may choose to accelerate that deadline but you're still going to have things on a weekly basis so it's up to you when you log in five o'clock in the morning lunchtime 6 pm 9 pm it really doesn't matter you take the responsibility you log in you get that information you do your weekly reading assignments you do your written assignments and you turn them in on time those weekly deadlines are designed to keep you on track because this course is completed in 14 weeks we're going to talk a little bit more about that schedule in a moment but 14 weeks goes by pretty quick we do deliver it in two seven week sessions and it is designed for busy adult learners so although i'm telling you that goes pretty quick it's definitely doable okay on our website we actually publish a full syllabus for every course that we offer you can not only see the learning objectives so before you ever register we'll tell you exactly what we're going to teach you we want all the courses that you take to be a good fit for what you want to learn so that's a good thing to review not only does it go over the learning objectives but our syllabus also has the list of books which you would see on a registration page in the bookstore but they are reiterated again on that syllabus the grading expectations are there course grades are based on weekly tests written assignments participation in those bulletin board um assignments that's the discussion forum and that next line that you see on the slide seventy percent is the minimum passing score i want to take a minute to explain that seventy percent minimum passing score on every assignment that you do that there is no cumulative grading on our in any of our courses basically what that means is every single assignment you do must have a 70 or better if it doesn't okay so i tell people that and they sometimes panic what happens if i don't pass the test what happens if i don't pass an assignment it's not the end of the world remember these courses are about developing skills it's about preparing you to go to work and be able to do the job so if worst case scenario you do not pass an assignment what's going to happen you're going to do it over you're going to get some additional instruction once you do that you'll be able to redo that assignment retake that test that quiz whatever it may be we want you to be successful we want you to pass so 70 or better is designed to make sure that you are proficient when you get out in the world we want you to be good at what you're doing you should plan to spend approximately 8 to 12 hours a week on this course that would include your reading time your online time your written assignment time that's an average here's the calculation i want people to take into account when they are anticipating how to schedule their lives for this eight to 12 hours is an average if you're reading comprehension because there's a lot of reading in this program if your reading comprehension is really strong and you can get things on a first read and you comprehend well and you're able to put that information back out and apply it to your assignments you might end up spending less time if you're the type of person that needs to read things multiple times you may end up spending more but if you end up spending 15 20 hours a week on the course honestly you probably ought to check in with your instructor and get some feedback from them because you might be overthinking some or maybe going down a little wrong path anything in the 20 hour range is probably going to be too much remember what i said a few moments ago this is designed for busy folks there is no reason why you can't work full-time take care of your family and add this to your life get it done at the same time that you're still doing everything else there is a nice little 10-day break between sessions so if you get really busy and you got to let the laundry pile up you can do it in between sessions so clean the house then then just dive back in for the next seven weeks learning outcomes a few moments ago i told you in the syllabus we list all of the learning objectives we're telling you what we're going to teach you you know what you're going to learn legal research you'll have exposure to writing assignments you're going to learn about civil procedure ethics very important rules of evidence towards contracts all the things that you see on the screen you're going to be exposed to and have assignments and readings that involve all of these topics we want you to leave this program well-rounded and ready to assist your new employer or if you're looking to move up in a career and you're taking this to earn a promotion we certainly want to be positioning you well to show how competent you are we have done some fabulous upgrades in 2020 to our paralegal certificate course we used to have some recorded lectures there are more now and they have been upgraded and updated we've included a new element to our online courses it's in these formative assessments they are designed for you to be able to self-assess your learning without being graded so basically it's kind of like puzzles and games that you can test the vocabulary the concepts and you can do them as many times as you want to without any risk um they're there for you to practice to study with to help you retain the information so that when you do go to take a test or a quiz you're going to do well one thing about tests and quizzes these are not proctored you can use your materials when you take them so basically what i want you to understand is that these courses are not about memorizing things to pass tests it's not about you know cram it in and then go for a stressful test and see what your memory served it's really about understanding the concepts we want you to be able to understand comprehend the information and put it back out using your own words citing your sources applying the skills appropriately the paralegal certificate course that is designed to give you a foundation it's going to be all the core skills you need to be ready to go to work as a paralegal now we do have an advanced program which ha was and it still is specifically designed for our california folks for which we currently i think we've got about 15 schools in california we work with so we take care of a lot of paralegals in that state california is the only state in the entire country that actually has legislated regulations for paralegal training the criteria dictated by the california business and professions code 6450 lets you know how many hours of substantive legal training you must complete to work as a paralegal that magic number is 24 semester units which our advance program in conjunction with the paralegal certificate is designed to meet so our advanced paralegal certificate does have a prereq that you take in the paralegal once you do that you can start taking these advanced coursework courses advanced legal research bankruptcy law constitutional criminal law estate planning family law you can see them all up on the screen in order to earn that advanced certificate a student needs to take six out of the 16 available and you're allowed to take them one two or three at a time in a single seven week session so you can take them one at a time two at a time or three at a time max students have 12 months to complete the six they need to earn an advanced certificate you can skip sessions you can do whatever combination you want we're very flexible then but you do need to have all six done to earn the advance certificate your 12 month clock in that program would start ticking as soon as you took the first topic okay so another thing that we have coming up right now is we are starting at the center for legal studies to work on some specialization certificates so our california students have to take six topics to earn the advanced certificate um the specialization certificates that we are just rolling out right now allow for a student to take the paralegal certificate along with one topic and we actually have two of those available right now one is through our florida partner schools florida gulf coast and lake sumner state college they are offering a special paralegal certificate with a specialization in estate planning that is going to be a whereas you know paralegal is a fourteen week course two seven week sessions the new specialization certificate is paralegal one paralegal two and estate planning in florida if you want to take that course it is available for january 11th our next session we also have a specialization certificate available through our denver metropolitan state university auburn university and northeastern illinois university three schools that are doing the paralegal plus family law the specialization certificates are at an introductory rate right now to 1795 which is a two hundred dollar savings because those advanced topics for advanced paralegal are four hundred dollars a piece we'll go over some of the numbers in a future slide if you are interested in doing one of the currently available specialization special i can say that word specialization certificates then what you want to do is probably reach out tomorrow or the next day to one of our enrollment counselors these certificates are on our website you can read about them just go to the courses tab at the top of the page at www.legalstudies.com but if you have any additional questions about them we'd love to have speak with you so you can always give our enrollment counselors a call during normal business hours and those hours are from 8am to 6pm monday through friday let's talk about the career outlook for paralegals they work everywhere everybody knows paralegals work in law offices okay that's just a given they work in an awful lot of other places too the banking industry hires paralegals every major corporation has got a legal department they hire paralegals construction companies accounting firms corporations um private enterprise real estate the court systems the government agencies just a million different places that you can apply this skill set in actuality it is one of the most transferable skill sets you can get so if you choose to take this program earn the paralegal certificate there's a world of opportunities for you the national average for paralegals i believe now is going to have that on the next slide we're going to look at what the u.s department of labor is telling us 10 growth in the next nine to ten years which is awesome that much faster than the national average the median salary in the united states today over 51 000 plus benefits and again this lists some of the different industries in which you could work nice thing with our world the way it is today this is the kind of work that you can do from home home office a lot of time on the computer our technology today allows for this to be a home-paced job and a lot of our students are looking into freelancing if tha is something you want to do if you want to be a legal document preparer if you want to work as a freelance paralegal my advice to you is one not only take the paralegal certificate but look at some of those advanced topics you're going to need some advanced training to set you apart from others the other thing you want to do is when you're taking our programs pay particular attention to when the instructor teaches what you can and cannot do with or without the supervision of a licensed attorney so i want to repeat that because it's really important if it is your intention to work independently as a freelance in any capacity when you're in class pay very close attention to what the instructor says you can and cannot do with or without the supervision of a licensed attorney because those are going to be very defining lines in what you're able to do out in the world okay moving on enrolling how easy is it piece of cake our website at legalstudies.com is incredibly user friendly you can search for a course from the home page where it says find a course just put in the course title put in your state click search it's going to bring up a whole list of all the states that offer that program and the schools within those states that we have partner schools click on the one you want it's always going to be our advice if we have a school close to where you live and where you intend to work that's the wise choice the school is going to issue your certificate we are going to train you the instructors work for us but the certificate will come from the school you designate when you register now when you get to that page you want to scroll down to the course schedule section click on that green box that says online it's going to open up you're going to see all the future sessions the center for legal studies academic calendar is broken down into six seven week sessions per year we already know paralegal is a 14-week training you do not need to sign up for two sessions that fifteen hundred ninety five dollar tuition pays for both you are not going to pay that money twice simply select the session in which you want to begin we'll automatically enroll you in the one that follows when you complete that process you can add it to cart if it happens to be one of our schools that prefers to take registration themselves the website will direct you it'll say click here to register with school or it'll give you a phone number if it says add to cart you can simply add it to your shopping cart as easy as buying something on amazon right beneath that you'll see all the required textbooks for that course you can add those into your cart at the same time go up to the top right hand corner of our webpage you'll find your shopping cart click on that and you can go to checkout you have i'm going to come back and talk about west law in just a minute but when you get to the checkout screen you have the choice with everything in your cart to either check out with a credit card debit card and proceed through or you can apply for a firm we use a third party vendor that will actually take your grand total your tuition your books your westlaw access which is access to the online law library system that you'll be utilizing during the second half of paralegal you can take that grand total click on apply for a firm it'll give you a little short form to fill out it's going to take you less than a minute it's really fast it is a credit-based application but they accept a very wide range of credit and they accept cosigners so if you apply for that if you're approved for it they're going to come back within just a couple of minutes and give you a whole list of scenarios they will tell you what the payment would be for three month repayment six months 12 months up to 18 months and they'll show you what all those different payments would be and at that point in time you can choose do i want to pay for it in full or do i want to put it out on a payment plan the choice is yours we do encourage all students to at least apply for a firm because many of them are accepted and then you have the choice to go either way whichever one is a better fit for your budget this is a small sampling of some of the partners that we work with in the country but by no means all of them like i said we work currently with almost 170 schools nationwide and the odds are that we do have one where you are if by chance you happen to live in one of the three or four states we don't currently have a partner such as nevada or arkansas you should choose the neighboring state like i said at the beginning of the presentation we work with continuing education and professional studies departments at schools that offer non-credit coursework that specialize in job skills training programs and so we're not in every school in the country but there is certainly plenty for you to choose from and every one of our partners are awesome many of them have been with us for years and years longer than i've been around which is a long time to enroll we talked a little bit about that process that you can complete on our website at www.legalstudies.com you can also call our enrollment counselors they are available monday through friday and very easy the phone number's all over our website but it's here as well 1-800-522-7737 they are very well versed in everything a to z about these programs and can certainly assist you you can also send an email to info that's info at legalstudies.com and we'll be happy to send you an email response back our web address www.legalstudies.com the next session for every single online course that we offer begins on january 11th students are already registering today we do encourage or early registration we'll accept it right up to the day but keep in mind these courses require books we'll drop ship them to your doorstep but shipping takes time especially around the holidays so if you're going to order your books try to get that done soon get registered as soon as you know you're going to take the course because that syllabus is available the reading charts are in the syllabus if you've got your books you can start reading before class starts and set yourself up in a good position to be very well prepared at the beginning all right thank you so much stephanie as we said we're going to answer some of your questions here live if you have a question please put it in the q a feature and we'll either respond directly there or live on the webinar we did get quite a few questions already so again as stephanie said if we don't get to your question today feel free to reach out to us uh stephanie so our first question is asking if we also offer in person or for the time being zoom classes in addition to the online only course we do have a live lecture option that we've always offered at select partner schools now pre-covered that meant literally live lecture on a campus with an instructor and you would be there all day saturday all day sunday from nine to five for six or seven weekends in a row today in the world of covid no one's going to campus for our courses so we have moved those to a zoom class now they are still available only through select schools if you are interested in doing a zoom class it's going to be on a schedule that is very similar to what the live would be so we have some schools that do the saturdays and sundays all day we have some that do evening classes or maybe it's less hours a week and it's stretched out over more weeks they're all going to be custom schedules and you would need to be present in front of the computer on that schedule live classes require that you are sitting there face to face on camera in that zoom classroom for the scheduled time and you must be at least i believe 80 to 85 in attendance so you can't miss class whereas the online classes you never have to be sitting there at any particular time you have a lot more flexibility and control over your own personal schedule with the online but both options are available great thank you we have a couple questions that are pretty similar some people asking if an internship is required to get a job as a paralegal and when they'll be ready to work after completing this course so this is a job skills training program you are ready to go to work as a paralegal upon completion if you reside in the state of california you would need to complete the advanced course work as well the advanced coursework for other students throughout the country is a voluntary measure i can tell you about 50 percent of our students nationwide voluntarily choose to take the advanced program and they do that because they know the more training they have the more valuable they'll be or they have an idea of which type of law they want to be working in and they will pick up a couple classes in those areas just to make themselves more proficient before entering the workforce but upon completion you are job ready and you certainly can head out to work regarding internships no we do not do internships but we do have a careers board on our website where employers who have hired our graduates in the past anytime they have an opening choose to advertise that with us so our students get a first crack at those great thank you and kind of continuing off of that does the center for legal studies offer with any other employment services or resume review interview tips we do that would be through your instructor and it's by request only so you would they're not going to volunteer to read everyone's resume in the class but they very much will read yours if you ask them to so they'll review a cover letter they'll review a resume they're not going to grade it but they will advise you on things you might want to omit or things you might want to include or rearranging it in a way that would appear more professional and get you a higher success rate in having it viewed so if you're planning to take this course toward the end not in the first week but you know toward the end of the course absolutely reach out to your instructor to have your resume reviewed by them they will enjoy doing it for you great thank you stephanie uh we have a question from someone asking if they have to be a registered student at their selected university uh specifically they recently finished their undergrad so should they enroll with the same school and do they need to be registered student there you do not need to be a registered student at any one of the schools that we partner with because these courses are offered through continuing and professional education they are open enrollment anyone can take them the minimum requirement will be um high school diploma or ged and that's not because we want you to dig it out of the basement and send us a copy it's so that students understand these courses are taught on a college level and so we want you to be successful you need to come to the table with college-level reading and writing skills other than that open enrollment you're good to go as far as selecting the partner school that you've just completed undergraduate work or taking other courses it makes sense to choose that school because then your resume is all going to match up together this certificate with your degree thank you stephanie um can you speak to what the average response time is with instructors and a bit more about the instructor interaction sure i mentioned earlier in the presentation that our instructors are working professionals okay so like many of our students have full-time jobs so does your teacher when the class commences instructors will typically post to their students when they keep weekly office office hours so obviously response time is going to be a little quicker then or if you want to set up an appointment with an instructor or something like that occasionally instructors might even set up you know a zoom meeting or a special time for other things but typical time outside of any of that special stuff would be 12 to 48 hours somewhere in that window if you've got an attorney that's teaching your course and they're in the middle of a trial you're going to fall in the long end because that trial is going to take precedence and we do allow our instructors to have a reasonable amount of turnaround time but they really do try their best to get back to you as quickly as possible so a reasonable rate of return and expectation for a response is probably going to be somewhere next day day after great thank you stephanie um someone is asking about what resources they need to take the course so in addition to the tuition and books and westlaw for the second half is anything else required besides a computer and internet no not required um we do sell orange dictionary of the law it's then that is a recommended tool for anyone taking any course that we offer if you already have a law dictionary you're good to go you don't need to buy another one but we do sell one because we believe that it's a very useful tool for you there's a ton of new vocabulary in all of these legal courses and you're not only going to use this law dictionary to take this class if you're going to go work in this career you're going to need it long term so you may as well pick it up now great thank you um speaking of enrollment can you reiterate the next enrollment date and where the 2021 core states can be found absolutely every course page on our website you'll scroll down when you get pull up a course and you go to the course page it's got the title a little bit about this course and then it'll have the school name there just scroll down to the course schedule section click on that green box for online you will see a full 12-month outlook it's a rolling calendar for our session dates so right now if you go on our website and look at it it's really neat and tidy it lists session one through six because session one is the next opportunity and that session date begins on january 11th after we launch that session it's going to roll to the bottom and at the top of the list you'll say to see session number two so it'll say two three four five six one and that session one at the bottom will be the 2022 session one so no matter when you look on our website you will always see a 12 month outlook for six sessions per year and again that next one is january 11th great thank you stephanie we have just a few minutes left for our webinar today and we've gotten quite a few questions so again if we don't get to yours you can reach out to us after the webinar and i'll put that contact information back on the screen in just a moment but we have time for one or two more questions we have some questions um about grading and passing the course can you reiterate how the uh 70 pass requirement works and um what would happen if um someone does not pass the course okay so you'll see in the syllabus that the grading requirement or expectation for the course is 70 or better on every assignment that you do which means we're not going to average your grades together you can't go and get a hundred on one assignment and a 50 on another assignment and add them together for a 75 no 70 or higher on every assignment so if you bomb a test if you bomb a quiz it's not the end of your world you're going to connect with your instructor you're going to get some additional instruction get the feedback find out why you didn't pass that assignment you're going to study some more and you're going to redo it and you will be given one opportunity to take it again with some extenuating circumstances then that'll be handled on a case-by-case basis but you will automatically get one retake if you do not pass that test or quiz so rather than focus on not passing it know this the program's designed to help you be successful your instructor is there to support you we want you to do well we want you to do better than 70 because when we you go out into the world we want you to be successful it makes us look good it makes our partner schools look good and you do better that's the whole goal so it's doable okay open book tests open book quizzes use your materials take good notes do your reading assignments you're going to be fine it's not fluffy you're gonna work but you're gonna earn it okay thank you stephanie um if someone has a perhaps their highest level of education is a high s hool diploma or they have a bachelor's degree in a completely different field can they take this course and can you speak again to how this course will increase someone's hireability um you know whether you just have a high school diploma or you've got a master's degree and we have students all across the board 75 of our students have got degrees whether it be an associates a bachelor's and master's we have folks with phds and if you just got your high school diploma that's okay too paralegal is an unregulated profession you don't need you don't have to have those degrees what an employer wants to know is that you've been trained to do the job that's the purpose of this program earning this certificate is going to be able to show an employer you've been trained to do the job now if you have a higher ed degree an associate's a bachelor's or master's might you yield a higher pay rate going in might it get you some open doors that others may not be possibly okay the more training you have the more valuable you are but the purpose of this certificate is to prove to an employer that you've been trained to do the job that's what they're going to pay you for okay great thank you so much stephanie with that we're going to wrap it up here thank you to everyone for attending today again and we got a lot of questions so if your question was not answered today please do not hesitate to reach out to us at the phone number or email on the screen our enrollment counselors are available and ready to help you um with your personalized questions or just general questions about the course we'll be sending out the video recording of this webinar if you would like to watch it back so please look out for that in your email inbox by the end of the week and as mentioned our next course session begins on monday january 11th so now is the perfect time to visit legalstudies.com enroll today get your books ordered so you're all ready to go thank you again and thanks to stephanie for your presentation today have a great day everyone thanks for joining us we'll see you in class