Bankruptcy Academy Commences Courses For Bankruptcy Paralegals
As a consequence of Bankruptcy law reform in 2005, the need for professional training in bankruptcy law has increased for lawyers and their staffs. The King Bankruptcy Academy is adding new courses and resources to help meet the need.
Online, July 20, 2010 (Newswire.com) - One of the perhaps unintended consequences of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 is that the cost of going bankrupt for consumers and small businesses has skyrocketed due to increases in attorneys' fees. The sharp rise in legal costs is due to the greater complexity of consumer bankruptcy law imposed by the Reform Act.
Consumer Bankruptcy attorneys are experiencing the pressure of more paperwork, more rules, and more obtacles to providing bankruptcy discharge services, at the same time that the volume of cases has jumped due to the economic downturn.
Besides working longer hours, consumer bankruptcy lawyers find that they must rely more heavily on skilled office help to handle paperwork, information gathering and verification, communications with clients, and complicated calendaring tasks. To meet the need they are hiring more paralegals. Unfortunatley, in many offices paralegals are having to "learn by doing," which everyone in the profession agrees is not a desirable way to learn this area of law.
Professional bankruptcy organizations are trying to meed the need for more and better training. The largest organization of lawyers, the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) is experiencing record attendance at its annual conventions and workshops. A new entity, the National Society of Virtual Bankruptcy Assistants, to help new bankruptcy paralegals, has recently begun accepting memberships.
Among such organizations, the King Bankruptcy Academy, established in 2000 to help train bankruptcy lawyers, has recently announced the expansion of its online video course to include bankruptcy paralegals. The course, Fundamentals of Consumer Bankruptcy Law For Paralegals, consists of 25 short video courses adding up to 12 hours of instruction by experienced attorneys and paralegals. Each video session is followed by an interactive, graded test. In addition, regular teleconferences supplement the learning process.
The tests are intended not just to measure whether the paralegal student has mastered the topic, but also as a learning-reinforcement tool; each incorrect answer is returned to the student with an explanation of why the answer is wrong, and the correct answer.
King Bankruptcy Academy is located at BankruptcyAcademy.com, and is an affiliate of BankruptcyPractice.com. The director, Morgan King, is an attorney with 40 years of experience, and is the recipient of NACBA's Distinguished Service Award.