User talk:Kaycee1217

Hi. Its nice to discuss law with a lawyer from another jurisdiction who seems well informed on the subject. What does "paralegal" mean in Oregon? Over here the term is a bit vague but covers people with law degrees who may or may not have some vocational training (it varies a lot). Adverse possession is (sadly because I've done lots of research on it) fading away here as a result of increasing amounts of land registration, but the boundary moving example you give is still very much alive and does help end disputes. Francis Davey (talk) 17:11, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi Francis,

Sorry ... I've just noticed your message. I've been glancing at Wikipedia for years, but this is the first time I've had an account and gotten involved in any discussion. So I didn't realize you had sent me a message.

"Paralegal" is a bit vague here, as well, but the idea is that paralegals do a lot of the work that lawyers do, but without a law degree and with less expense. (I'm surprised at how difficult it is to explain this.)

In practice, paralegals work with licensed lawyers and help with some of the nitty-gritty tasks that take up a lot of a lawyer's time. A client theoretically saves money by being billed at the paralegal's rate rather than the lawyer's. (A lawyer in my region might charge $200-$300 an hour, while a paralegal might charge $30-$50 an hour for essentially the same work.)

Probably all of the states have stringent rules that bar the "unauthorized practice of law," so paralegals must be supervised by a lawyer. A paralegal can't simply open up a shop and say, "Come to me and have your legal work done on the cheap." The client will still have to retain the services of a lawyer.

My story is that I was a newspaper editor for 30 years, but was laid off about 18 months ago. I imagine newspapers are in decline in the UK, as well? The layoff came three months after I started dating a woman who had been a lawyer for 25 years, but was trying to get into teaching. Long story ... but the gist is that she's gone back to her private law practice and I'm working as her legal assistant while taking courses at a local community college to gain a two-year degree as a paralegal.

I actually just tonight finished my fifth course in the program. I have eight more to go (I think). I'm taking two courses per term and the college has four terms per year, so I have another year to go for my degree. The program requires students to do an internship with a law practice, and my work with my friend counts, so I'm actually an intern as well. ("Intern" in this context refers to a student getting real-world experience for no pay.)

Paralegal work involves legal research (hence my familiarity with adverse possession), documentation, record-keeping, and so on. Paralegals can also interview clients. They cannot appear in court on behalf of a client. They cannot discuss legal fees with a client.

As for adverse possession, I think it's very rarely used here. It seems to make a little bit of sense in vast rural areas where borders are hard to define. But property lines in and around cities are so well defined that it's hard to justify any adverse possession claim.

The case we had was an odd one because it involved a large vacant lot. The neighbors have had homes next to this lot since the 1960s, and, as you might expect, they found ways to encroach upon it. We were able to prove that the various owners of the vacant lot ... those who preceded our clients ... had a history of making it clear to the neighbors where the property lines were. If we hadn't been able to get some of these previous owners to testify for our clients, we might very well have lost.

I spent some time last week -- in the midst of our two-day trial -- driving back and forth to court with an 80-year-old woman who used to live next door to the home occupied by the adverse claimant. It was interesting trying to explain this arcane law to her, but I had to do that so she would understand the value of her testimony. So there's an example of something a paralegal can do.

Francis, you might like to see the competing trial memorandums (memoranda?) prepared by the attorneys. I'm afraid ours runs to 37 pages. The claimant's memo is only eight pages. But I don't mind saying that ours was MUCH stronger! We did win the case, and pretty handily, it seems to me.

But I'm new to this, so it's hard for me to know what to expect.

Anyway, if you give me an e-mail address, I could send you the memos. The other attorney cited only three court cases in his document. We referred to about 20, I think. There actually was quite a bit of history to dig up.

Oh, I'll send you the Oregon statute as well. The language on adverse possession is pretty explicit.

Good to talk to you,

(PS -- call me Rick)

Rick Mark ...

Kaycee1217 (talk) 05:52, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi. Wikipedia and its ways takes a lot of getting used to. I have enabled emails on my account so you should just be able to email me, but if not I am at fjmd1a@gmail.com and happy to be emailed and read memoranda (in our usage) etc. I was formerly a computer scientist so I understand the change of career idea. Things are a little different here in terms of the way lawyers work, we don't have a notion of "practising law" that you do - pretty much anyone can set up shop and give legal advice and indeed there are big business involved in representing people at employment tribunals that may not have any lawyers in them. That may change because its open to abuse.

Really there are only a few "reserved" areas that you can't do if you aren't the right profession: will writing, conveyancing, conducting litigation and appearing in court. Appearing in court is a bit flexible at the lowest levels and lots of fairly minor stuff is done by people we'd call paralegal clerks (usually with a bar qualification or similar but without the vocational training). But its more complicated than it looks, you'd probably count as training to be a legal excutive (over here) who used to be a sort of paralegal, but are now a fully fledged legal profession in their own right. I have the devil's own time explaining to people from the US how things work coz its so different. But fun. Francis Davey (talk) 14:44, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I just finished a class in "legal ethics," where we spent a good bit of time exploring whether the practice of law should be restricted to lawyers. On the one hand, opening the practice to non-lawyers would make the legal system more accessible to lower-income people. As it is now, the cost of taking legal action is so high that most people are cut out of the system and are probably obliged to suffer some injustice. On the other hand, by limiting the practice to lawyers the system maintains at least a semblance of standards and (don't laugh) integrity. At the least, lawyers pay a heavy price for malpractice because they risk being exiled from a lucrative career. A non-lawyer would have less to lose from skirting the rules or taking advantage of a client or mishandling a case. Kaycee1217 (talk) 18:34, 14 June 2009 (UTC)