Ontario Paralegal and Legal Admin students gear up for uLaw in the classroom
Now that the New Year's celebrations have come to a close, students in more than 8 colleges across Ontario will be encountering uLawPractice modules in their curriculum.
uLawPractice is usually taught in the curriculum of paralegal schools. But increasingly, legal administrator courses are beginning to make use of uLawPractice.
Effective Jan 6, instructors at Centennial College will be introducing uLaw to their legal office administration students. uLaw will be used as a tool for students to learn how to create compliance and accounting documentation required within a law firm. Cohorts of students will be led through the requirements laid out by their instructors, and will receive hands-on training on how to navigate the software to fulfill this requirements.
The students will be making use of a shared uLaw EDU account, which allows multiple users to perform tasks as if they were operating as an actual law firm.
For several years, Centennial College and uLaw EDU have been partnered; though mostly only for paralegal courses. Due to the success and viability of uLaw as a useful adjunct in the college curriculum, it has grown in popularity and is now used across different classes.
"This is a theme we hope increases with time, as the share of work conducted by law firms can vary based on the composition of a legal firm enterprise in Canada," says uLawPractice CEO Terry Curtis. "Sometimes lawyers are a one-man show, handling all their records, books, and accounting in addition to supporting their clients in court. Other firms share these responsibilities. Either way, uLaw has a large toolkit available for small to mid-sized firms, no matter who is handling the work."
In the tail-end of 2024, this partnership with Centennial was expanded to additionally support students who are enrolled in similar courses, but for different diplomas.
Other schools such as Durham and Fanshawe Colleges are also heavily making use of uLawPractice, but they use a slightly different approach; whereby each individual student has their own account. This is called the "enhanced academic integrity" package, where students are not working in cohorts, but independently. Instructors individually evaluate student contributions based on the documents prepared via the usage of uLaw.
uLaw has a special place in the toolkit of legal educators across the spectrum of post secondary legal education in Canada. As law schools across the country modernize their approach to incorporating technology into the curriculum, our team is prepared to support law schools in their quest for preparing the next generation of legal practitioner.
"We commend paralegal colleges for their early adoption of specialized cloud-based legal accounting and practice management software. Our team is honoured to be considered a trusty choice, and we are diligent in maintaining that not a single law firm using uLawPractice has ever failed a practice audit. This is an important distinction, since it proves that the firms using uLawPractice are handling their finances in a responsible and ethical manner," says Curtis.
https://www.centennialcollege.ca/programs-courses/full-time/office-administration-legal/