Paralegal Case Study

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A paralegal must have good investigation skills that include interviewing, legal research and discovery management. These three skills are necessary for a paralegal to be successful in their career. When a paralegal utilizes these three skills they will prove to be valuable to their employer and the clients they are helping to represent. “Interviewing and investigation involves the application of critical thinking, organizational, communication, research, writing, and computer skills,” (Education, Paralegal Core Cometencies, 2002). A paralegal needs to know the right questions to ask and the right way to ask the questions when they are interviewing a client, witness or victim in the case they are working on. A paralegal also needs to have a good knowledge of the case that is being worked on before they conduct the interview. Knowing the case will help the paralegal to know what questions to ask. Paralegals need to know the different types of witnesses, victims, and clients they are interviewing. Each interviewee has different personalities. The interviewee could be defensive, passive, manipulative, honest or dishonest. To get the truth a paralegal needs to ask certain types of questions. As talked about in (Conducting Effective interviews, AICPA, 2013) there are five important types of questions to ask in an interview. Informational questions (unbiased in nature, non-confrontational), open questions (what, when, where, why, how), closed questions (yes or no answers), Leading Questions (contains part of the answer in the question to confirm facts already known), and admission seeking questions (questions geared toward getting admissions). All of these types of questions can get the right information out of the interviewee i... ... middle of paper ... ...xpert witnesses. Interviews and statements can be used in court if they are documented properly. The expert witness is used to support the evidence that has been obtained. These three things can preserve the discovery and support the case in court. To properly protect the evidence a paralegal will need to put documents together properly and securely. Put important documents, photographs and other evidence in plastic. This protects the evidence yet can still be viewed through the plastic. A paralegal should put all the case file and evidence in a clearly marked box and make backups and copies of all evidence gathered. “Learning basic investigative techniques will make you better at your job and increase your marketability to other firms. It’s also a lot of fun. Your next accident photo or witness interview might be the factor that wins the case.” (Bevans, 2004).

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