One of the college’s steadiest programs as far as enrollment and full-time instructors is the Paralegal program. It is, so far, the only program of the area technical colleges to be approved by the American Bar Association (ABA).

Everyone teaching in the program is an attorney with a variety of expertise to provide to students.

“The Paralegal profession is not regulated, so there is no license requirement,” said Instructional Chair Mike Sujecki. A previous petition was presented to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to regulate paralegals and require that they be licensed, but was not granted.

“So there is an ongoing effort to require some type of licensing,” adds Surjecki.

“It used to be that there was no bar exam anywhere, or even law school. Being a lawyer was more like a trade.

To become one you would apprentice with an attorney until you learned the ropes and then went off on your own.

Wisconsin doesn’t require a bar exam because the State Supreme Court and Board of Bar Examiners hasn’t felt the need to institute one,” said James Robinson, Jr., Marquette Law School graduate.

There has been some concern of attorneys taking up paralegal positions to build up experience. “If Wisconsin lawyers are taking paralegal positions, it’s because the economy sucks and they can’t find anything else, or they went to school out of state and couldn’t pass the bar exam, so technically they aren’t really lawyers yet,” adds Robinson.

A paralegal operates pretty much as an attorney, except cannot provide legal advice and cannot appear in court.

They do, among other things, legal research, prepare documents and interview witnesses.

For a student wanting to enter the program it would be helpful to have an interest in the law, like research, want to learn about the legal process and have good reading and writing skills.