Author Archives: legalparaeagle

Comparison between two Last Will and Testaments

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This example was the first assignment for my Computers and the Law course, meant to display the use of Microsoft Word more than familiarity with the provisions and format of estate documents. I utilized online examples to find the best legal terminology I could with my current skills.

 

The second example, from Introduction to the Law about 3 months later, comes in three parts. The assignment was to create a joint will and a living trust agreement, but my research revealed that joint wills are discouraged (though still technically legal) in Colorado. Instead, I executed a pair of mutual wills and prepared the requisite trust agreement. By this point I had gained a much better grasp of the necessary provisions of a proper will and was able to modify the standard language more extensively to suit my needs.

Comparison between 2 Memorandums of Law

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This first example, a memorandum on paralegal ethics and Colorado rules regarding Unauthorized Practice of Law, was one of the first assignments I completed for Introduction to the Law, the ground-level course in the paralegal program. As you can see, while my general writing skills were fairly good I had not yet entirely mastered the preferred format and writing style.

 

The second example is from two months later, and it shows a better understanding of how to present a case brief in memorandum form and also more detailed legal reasoning.

Legal research cheat sheet

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A list of web resources for fast, thorough legal research I put together for Introduction to Law. It was more than a little disturbing to me as a former librarian and FOIA officer that the state of Colorado farms its public statutes out to LexisNexis rather than managing their own website. The heavy reliance on the three dominant legal research companies (Lexis, Westlaw, and Loislaw) also made me uneasy. Call me a hippie or a hacker but I do believe that some information is meant to be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.

 

Primary Sources

Citation                                                                             Web Location

State statute (CCR, CRS, COR)                           Colorado Constitution, Court Rules, Revised Statutes

Code of Colorado Regulations

Colorado Online Register

United States Code (USC)                                     United States Code

Beta of new website

Cornell University browsable USC

Government Printing Office prior year codes

PDF version

United States Code – Annotated (USCA)  Westlaw signin

Lexis signin

FindLaw free version

Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)               Annualized GPO edition

FindLaw edition

Cornell University edition

Local ordinance                                                         El Paso County ordinances

Colorado Springs city code

Secondary Sources

Citation                                                                             Web Location

State digest                                                                        Colorado Law Digest purchase page

Federal digest                                                                  US Federal Law Digest purchase page

American Law Reports                                             Lexis signin

Encyclopedia                                                                   Wex, Legal Information Institute free encyclopedia

Nolo free legal encyclopedia

State                                                                                        LoisLaw Connect federal + one state ordering page

Corpus Juris Secundum                                          Westlaw signin

Periodicals & treatises                                               Hein Online signin

Martindale Legal Library

FindLaw articles

University of Colorado Law Review

The Colorado Lawyer (Colorado Bar Association)

Law Week Colorado

Denver Journal of International Law and Policy

More musings on legal ethics and information technology

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Continuing on in the spirit of my post on “The Dream of the Paperless Office”, this is a research piece I did for Computers and the Law as a make-up for assignments that required software inaccessible to students with a used copy of the (exorbitantly expensive) textbook. While I understand that creating a textbook is a time-consuming process (I should know, one of my college courses created a free online textbook as a final project) and the creators deserve to be compensated for their effort, if prices become so steep that only a few students in the class can stretch their budget to accommodate a new copy of the course text, the publisher’s bottom line is still going to hurt. With free options like Coursera and Open University growing by leaps and bounds, publishers need to rethink their business models from the ground up or risk becoming obsolete.

Separation Agreement

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Family Law’s toughest assignment by far was the separation agreement for the Jack and Jill Hill divorce case. The separation agreement is where the differences between the spouses really have to be confronted for the first time and the nitty gritty of breaking apart a shared household puts everyone’s nerves on edge. No wonder, then, that each section of the document has a “yes we do agree on this/no we’re still fighting about it” box to check. Divorces, like torts, are grueling  but necessary processes. The anguish of divorce today is piddling compared to the long-term personal misery and resentment of the fault-based divorce days when the law forced you to lie in order to get closure. There’s a reason the government put an end to that and now allows people an escape when “the legitimate objects of marriage have been destroyed”.

Civil pleading and answer

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This assignment was interesting in that it forced one to look at a case from both sides and think about the differing points of view and legal strategies involved. Torts are not my favorite area of law (administrative law is really more my cup of Scottish breakfast tea) but just as “democracy is the worst possible system of government…except for all the other ones” (hat-tip to Winston Churchill) the tort system of conflict resolution is the imperfect best case scenario for disputes that used to be settled by blood feud. Humans are going to step on one another’s toes and crash into one another’s cars as long as we endure as a species so it’s vital that we have a way to systematically deal with these transgressions.

The complaint:

And the reply:

The Dream of the Paperless Office

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With my background in information science (I worked in libraries for several years before shifting to focus more on administration and legal writing), this assignment for Introduction to Law was a blast from the past.

The dream of the paperless office has been around since at least the late 1970s and, like Chinese democracy, always seems to be ten years away. The rise of broadband modems, wireless internet, and affordable electronic storage may mean that soon we really will hit a record low in office paper consumption…although as an archivist and thus a professional musty paper enthusiast I seriously doubt that our society will ever go truly paperless. “Different technologies have different affordances”, as my iSchool professors used to say. The physicality and scribblability of paper are just better for a certain subset of tasks, just as the accessibility and duplicability of electronic documents are just better for others.

I’m still very glad my parents paid for those touch-typing lessons back in grade school, though.

Family Law assignment scenario

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My Family Law course focuses pretty heavily on composing separation, custody, and divorce documents, so the professor handed out a sheet with a hypothetical couple, their children, their assets, and their tribulations and foibles. These formed the basis for several assignments that went from the initial filing and restraining order all the way through to the final divorce decree. I reproduce the scenario document here so that my future assignments based on it will be comprehensible.

And these were my first three documents produced from those assumptions:

The El Paso County Combined Courts have a, shall we say, quirk of using Wingdings characters for checkboxes on their downloadable forms, which makes them very difficult to fill out on the computer. I can’t imagine this encourages people to efile, but maybe they were concerned that creating real checkboxes in MS Word would make people with older versions of the software unable to open the documents.

Resume!

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For all you potential employers out there, and for all you paralegals who might want to see what a good resume template looks like filled out, I present to you my own resume.

If any nibbles come of this post, professional and personal references and educational transcripts are also available upon request by email or snailmail.

Prenups can be fun!

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Or at least they can be when the assignment scenario is as humorous and ripped-from-the-tabloids as this one.

Personally, I believe that prenuptial agreements get a bad rap. The most common complaints are that being so concerned with how the money gets split up is mercenary and unromantic, and that making contingency plans for if the marriage fails undermines the idea that you’re supposed to work to make sure your marriage is for life. My response to this has always been that someone whose love for their spouse is strong enough that they want to make sure even a divorce is as amicable and fair as possible is more romantic than flowery declarations that one’s love is blind to matters of money. Marriage has historically been and continues to be more advantageous for men than for women. We need to protect ourselves, ladies, even as we follow our hearts.