Kansas Paralegals: a Proposed Voluntary Certification Plan
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 18 |
| Citation | Vol. 80 No. 4 Pg. 18 |
Kansas Paralegals: A Proposed Voluntary Certification Plan
By Anita Tebbe, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KBA Paralegals Committee, atebbe@jccc.edu
“Don’t reinvent the wheel – just realign it.” This motto is being followed by the Kansas Bar Association Paralegal Committee in the development of a proposed self-funded voluntary certification plan for associate Kansas Bar Association members. Several states have successfully implemented similar voluntary certification programs, including North Carolina in 2004 (http://www.nccertified paralegal.org) and Ohio in 2008 (http://www.ohiobar.org.) The Kansas Committee is exploring these plans in order to map out an appropriate plan for the Sunflower State.
The paralegal profession was started in the 1960s. Under the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, legal secretaries were asked to perform more paraprofessional tasks and fewer clerical jobs in the implementation of federal government programs like the “War on Poverty.” These “paralegals” or “legal assistants” began to perform duties that, absent the paralegal, an attorney would perform.
In the past 45 years, the paralegal profession continues to mature and paralegals’ duties expand. Paralegals continue to work in the traditional environments of law firms and governmental agencies. They also are employed in bank trust departments, hospital risk management areas, title insurance companies, and corporate law departments. For the past ten years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has listed the paralegal profession as one of the fastest growing fields.
There has been, however, a specific dilemma which haunts the paralegal profession: anyone can call himself/herself a paralegal and begin working as a paralegal without any formal education or training. In order to address this troubling situation, the national legal community has been considering ways to improve the services offered by the professional paralegal to the public, under the supervision of an attorney. As an outgrowth of these discussions, states have started to offer voluntary certification plans, which assist in the establishment of paralegal standards.
The KBA Paralegals Committee is traveling down this voluntary certification road at a cautious and safe speed. The initiative began in September 2006. The committee received approval...
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