Ontario Paralegal Colleges deepen partnership with uLaw for curriculum

A new technological trend within Ontario Paralegal Colleges is emerging, with schools deepening their partnerships with uLawPractice.

As of October 2023, Fanshawe College, Anderson College, Centennial College and Durham College are deepening their partnership with uLawPractice.

Presently, the vast majority of Ontario colleges of applied arts and technology are partnered with uLawPractice. But for Fanshawe, Anderson, Centennial and Durham, these schools have upgraded their curricula with individualized accounts for students to conduct important accounting and practice management activities.

Dubbed the "Enhanced Academic Integrity" package, offered by uLaw EDU, students are being taught not only the theoretical and fundamental components of accounting and bookkeeping, such as debits, credits, Canada Revenue Agency & Law Society Compliance and more--but technical skills as well. Using uLawPractice, students are guided by instructors on how to actually conduct these activities with up-to-date, automated cloud-based software.

"Technical, hard skills are being delivered through colleges partnered with uLaw. And for the schools who have Academic Integrity as a priority, it's obvious that educators are serious about ensuring students graduate with a refined understanding of the diligence required to run a legal business," says Terry Curtis, CEO of uLawPractice.

uLaw EDU is offered as a free service to all eligible paralegal colleges and law schools across Canada. Called the "Self Managed" EDU plan, some colleges take advantage of this implementation so cohorts of students behave as if they were colleagues at a medium-sized law firm. Groups of students are able to login and do everything a practicing lawyer or paralegal would be doing: docketing time, intaking clients, all the way to issuing invoices and conducting other compliance activities. They do so within a shared interface, in the same way uLaw is used by hundreds of law and paralegal firms across Canada today.

Enhanced Academic Integrity

However, other schools are more heavily integrating uLaw training into the curriculum.

In the case of Fanshawe College, which originally piloted uLaw's "Enhanced Academic Integrity" plan, each student acquires their own licence to use the software for a term of 6 months. This means students individually have their own account, and are not working as a team. Schools using this platform want to encourage self study instead of working in a collaborative environment, where students can not see each other's work.

“Students were introduced to uLaw in the fifth week of my Legal Computer Applications class, and it was used extensively through to the end of the semester, with some breaks for a few weeks while we focused on other applications,” says Nicholas Dasios, Professor at Law Programs at Fanshawe College.

Since the 2021 pilot, other schools have followed in Fanshawe's wake.

Interested in learning more about uLaw EDU? Visit our page dedicated entirely to this subject