University of San Diego – Paralegal Program

DO NOT waste your time or money! There are plenty of other ABA approved programs out there, cheaper. Biggest mistake of my life, going to this program. The only positive thing about it are the professors for the specialty courses. Otherwise, I’m sure they hate the program (or those who run it) just as much! I can say I speak for quite a few people, but the fear the office staff put in the students, has them terrified to comment! Also, don’t expect help looking for a good paying job like they tell you in your initial interview… make note, they will NEVER put anything in writing that they told you– all phone conversations! And the woman who runs it? That’s another one star Unilocal!review in itself! Good lord!

As a life-​long student (When you stop learning, you die!), I took the opportunity to partake in the University of San Diego’s Paralegal certification program.
USD offers San Diego’s first American Bar Association approved paralegal training course. There are day specialist and evening generalist paralegal tracks offered. The day specialist programs are geared toward general or business litigation, while the evening generalist track gives exposure to a wider range of legal study.
When I participated, I chose the evening generalist track. We were required to take coursework in Legal Research, Civil Litigation, Corporations, Estates, Trusts and Wills, Criminal Law, Family Law, Real Estate, Bankruptcy, and Computers in the Legal Field. If you attend without having first received a bachelor’s degree, you will also be required to take Fundamental Legal Studies.
The classes are taught, for the most part, by attorneys active in each field of law. The computers course is taught by the legal studies research staff. Probably the most significant challenge was to get input/​feedback from instructors outside of class. Among the students in each class, there were numerous study sessions coordinated by the students. The challenge was to find an answer to questions that came up in study sessions that were not easily apparent in the text or in notes from the lecture.
Another challenge some folks experienced was that some of the instructors were not easy to ask questions of. They had their course outline and schedule to keep up with, and taking enough time to provide clear answers to questions being asked was not always an option.
If you have a better than average perception of the law, this coursework is certainly a good offering to make you capable of working as a legal assistant/​legal secretary/​paralegal. As with all learning, you get from it what you put into it. As it seems to me, some folks just needed a little more feedback to truly reap rewards.