5.1

The Paradox of Litigation Skills

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides you with the skill of researching not for primary authority, but for tools, writing aids, forms, and templates to help you create litigation documents. Of course, these skills and tools can also be used to research for documents related to other areas of law, such as contract examples, bankruptcy forms, corporation documents, and so forth.

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Lecture Notes . . .

Never, ever work when you don't have to!

This is not an exaggeration! It's an important mind set. An attorney does very little original work, and paralegals should follow that example.

Within the Writing Labs on this Website you will find templates for almost all of your written assignments. Templates help you more than forms in form books because they are in pleading format already. This means the caption, and page format, are set up for you. It is much like what you will be doing in a law firm when you use templates that already exist.

If you are having trouble getting the forms to work, you may have one of the following problems:

• You don't have Word or WordPerfect for Windows on your computer (required).

• Your Default Text Editor is not set to Word or WordPerfect. If this is the case, your computer is probably trying to bring the document up using WordPad or NotePad, which probably won't work. Consult your computer's documentation to change your Default Text Editor to Word or WordPerfect.

If you still can't get the templates to load correctly, you may need to create your own template. But try using them. They will save you a lot of time!

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Commonly Asked Questions . . .

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