Mock Trial - A New Paralegal Course from UC Irvine Extension
IRVINE, Calif. – June 2004 – This summer, continuing education students can experience the entire civil litigation process in a new and unique elective course offered through UC Irvine Extension’s Paralegal Certificate Program.
“Practical Applications of Civil Litigation is designed as a mock trial, where students are given the facts of the case and a set of documents, and they work from the initial service of the summons and complaint through the trial or settlement,” says Kathleen Houts Miller, CLA, CAS. Miller and Dennis Nakata, the two instructors for this course, are graduates of UC Irvine Extension’s Paralegal Certificate Program. Both are practicing litigation paralegals with Rutan & Tucker, the largest law firm in Orange County, with over 120 attorneys and 16 paralegals focused on areas of law from Business Litigation and Employment/Labor Law to Intellectual Property, Environmental, and Real Estate law.
Miller and Nakata know firsthand how valuable knowledge of the litigation process and “real-world” application of the concepts can be to a paralegal. They’ve designed this course as a way to prepare students for assignments they will typically be expected to handle in the workplace and give them the skills necessary to “hit the deck running.”
The course covers all the essential elements, including:
- Civil litigation
- Pertinent court rules
- Calendaring
- Discovery process (including depositions and propounding/responding to discovery requests)
- Preparing documents for filing purposesLegal writing
- Researching applicable rules and statutes
“By design, one of the great aspects of this course is that in the end, students will have a resource-rich compendium of documents at their fingertips to use as a reference when they’re are on the job. And the broad-reaching nature of the course addresses issues beyond trial, such as collecting on a judgment and filing an appeal,” says Nakata. “This course is essentially the culmination of students’ paralegal study—a chance for them to integrate all the methods,concepts, and theories they’ve learned in the program and put it into actual practice.”
The seven-meeting course begins on Thursday, June 24th, from 6:30-9:30pm on the UC Irvine campus. For more information and to register, please call (949) 824-5414 or visit us on web at extension.uci.edu.
UC Irvine Extension is the nonprofit, continuing education branch of the University of California, Irvine. It is self-supporting and offers life- and career-enhancing programs in many areas, including over 50 professional learning pathways. To request a UC Irvine Extension catalog, call (949) 824-5414 or visit extension.uci.edu.
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