Interviewing and Investigating Essential Skills for the Paralegal [Connected eBook]

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Interviewing and Investigating: Essential Skills for the Paralegal, Ninth Edition, provides a thorough and practical approach to helping paralegal students establish a strong foundation in interviewing and investigating skills. Experienced author Stephen Parsons carefully places that instruction in exactly the context of civil disputes, criminal prosecutions, and commercial business transactions where modern lawyers need assistants with those skills. Students learn how to identify and locate witnesses, obtain vital information from both public and private sources, and how to arrange and conduct effective interviews of clients and witnesses, both in the office and in the field. Throughout, the text uses explanations, examples, and illustrations along with realistic case studies with vetted student role-playing assignments to accomplish its pedagogical goals.

New to the Ninth Edition:
● New and freshened examples, hypotheticals, and Learn by Doing exercises
● Updated references to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and Federal Rules of Evidence
● All forms have been updated
● Updated references to numerous online resources
● Chapters 1 and 2 contain expanded discussion of attorney responsibility and potential liability for paralegal conduct, including new ABA Formal Opinion 506 dealing with the use of paralegals for intake work
● Chapter 2 also expands coverage of the movement toward non-lawyer legal licensing
● Revised coverage of personal jurisdiction in civil litigation in Chapter 3
● In the chapters on communication skills and interviewing, fresh consideration of concepts such as implicit bias as the potential enemy of communication and comprehension.
● Continued emphasis on the latest developments in communication technology
● Expanded discussion of the implications of the growing participation by individuals and entities in social media on the tasks of identifying and locating witnesses, interviewing clients and witnesses, and e-discovery in civil and criminal cases
● New coverage of Artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology

Professors and students will benefit from:
● Dynamic pedagogy, including hypotheticals with questions, Learn by Doing exercises, chapter summaries, and basic review questions in every chapter
● Examples from civil, criminal, litigation, and non-litigation scenarios
● Emphasis on ethical and professional standards, integrated throughout the text and focused on in a chapter devoted to ethical issues
● Four realistic cases for analysis and use in the Learn by Doing exercises-homicide, personal injury, domestic relations, and a commercial real estate development project
● Keep in Mind feature emphasizes and recaps important points

Summary of  Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

PART 1: Foundations for Interviewing and Investigating
Chapter 1: Introduction to Interviewing and Investigating
Chapter 2: Ethical and Professional Responsibilities for Legal Professionals Engaged in Interviewing and Investigating
Chapter 3: The Adversarial System, ADR, and Pre-Filing Investigation
Chapter 4: Formal Discovery in Civil Litigation
Chapter 5: Formal Discovery in Criminal Litigation
Chapter 6: Rules of Evidence for the Investigator—Part 1
Chapter 7: Rules of Evidence for the Investigator—Part 2
Chapter 8: Communication Skills for the Investigator

PART 2: Formulating and Executing a Plan of Investigation
Chapter 9: Formulating a Plan of Investigation
Chapter 10: Preparing for a Client Interview
Chapter 11: Conducting a Client Interview
Chapter 12: Preparing for a Witness Interview
Chapter 13: Conducting a Witness Interview
Chapter 14: Identifying and Locating Fact Witnesses
Chapter 15: Working with Expert Witnesses
Chapter 16: Public Sources of Information—Federal
Chapter 17: Public Sources of Information—State and Local
Chapter 18: Private Sources of Information

Appendix: Case Studies
Glossary
Table of Cases
Index