interview 2

Amanda is the finance and admin coordinator at ECLC, a non-profit organization. She handles financial tasks and supervises administrative duties. Ainsley is a civil law legal assistant who supports lawyers in various courts, dealing with different cases. They both face challenges in their roles, such as figuring out next steps and navigating different courts. They discuss the potential regulation of paralegals in Alberta and how it may impact the industry. Amanda believes that regulation could provide more structure and opportunities, while Ainsley mentions the need to consider current paralegals and their experience. They discuss how other professions have implemented regulation and the potential for challenge exams or alternative pathways for current paralegals. Okay. So, do you want to start, Angela, or? All right. So, we just kind of want to start by asking a little bit about your overview of each of you, what you do, and just kind of what the role looks like in your side of the industry. Do you want to start, Angela? Well, you can go right ahead, if you'd like. Okay. So, my name is Amanda. I'm the finance and admin coordinator at ECLC. And so, being in a nonprofit, we wear many hats. So, my primary role is the finance piece. And so, that includes payroll, payables, financial reporting monthly to our executive director. So, anything that has to do with money is me, and managing our benefit plan. And then, the admin piece of my role, the admin coordinator piece, is that I supervise all of our administrative stuff. So, that includes our reception, our legal assistance. And then, I also do tech and HR, and a whole bunch of other things. Wow, a little bit of everything. Yes. Yes. I work a variety of hats here. All right. Perfect. And then, you want to... Yeah. Sorry. My name's Ainsley. I'm the civil law legal assistant. And I started in October, so I'm still kind of figuring out exactly everything. But I support the lawyers in a variety of different courts. So, our civil team deals with, like, RTA, so Residential Tenancy Act stuff. That usually goes through the RTTRS. And then, we do... Hold on. Like, foreclosure, judgment enforcement, general litigation, human rights complaints, employment issues, kind of wills and estates. And so, there's a whole bunch of different courts. So, a lot of the job is trying to figure out how to navigate each of those, and filing in the different courts, making sure that the correspondence is going out and is drafted, and contacting the clients, like, talking to the clients a lot. Yeah. I'm not sure if that was a good explanation. No, it's different in every place, I feel like. You're always kind of learning and navigating with how they run things. So, the definition is going to change everywhere you go, I think. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, what are the main struggles you're currently seeing when you are working in this stuff? Is it just not knowing? It's like... Yeah, because there's such a wide variety of what we're doing. It's predominantly here. It's figuring out what is the next step, what is the appropriate forms, and where do we file them? How do we file them? How do we serve them? Whereas my previous role, I was working in a very specific area, and so I kind of was more able to get more in-depth. Whereas here, it's very broad, and so trying to figure out next steps is certainly the biggest challenge. Big learning curve. Yeah. Yeah. And, Ainsley, have you heard about the regulation of paralegals and that being a possibility in Alberta? Yeah. So, I'm actually in a legal assistance group on Facebook. It's a support group for legal assistance and students and paralegals, and that's something that they've been talking about. I was going to look at it before the meeting, but I ran out of time, unfortunately. But I kind of hear bits and pieces of it coming down the pipe, potentially. And in Alberta, because it hasn't been regulated, the role of paralegal is very undefined. So it's, yeah, I've heard rumors, but nothing. Is it something that you would agree with happening here, or what's your take on that? I don't think I have, like, I think it would make sense to regulate it. The lawyers are regulated. I have a friend who is a, I think it's certified paralegal in Ontario. I'm not sure what the designation is. But she, like, she pays dues. She has ethical obligations. She has to kind of keep up with her professional development. And, like, there's a bunch of, there's more structure to her role there, whereas here it's kind of, you've been working for legal assistance, or as a legal assistant for a while, you have some in-depth knowledge, and that tends to be kind of, you end up being a paralegal, but there's no actual formal checklist of how that happens. Yeah, so anyone can just take the title of paralegal. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Amanda, I would like to ask, you know, do you think that kind of regulation would be affect agencies like you are in charge of? Like, the Edmonton Community Legal Center would potentially be affected by the regulation itself, or do you think that would be something that impacts directly? So that's a really interesting question. So before we joined this interview, we had our monthly admin team meeting, and so we sort of chatted about this a little bit. ACLC is a little bit different in that we currently don't employ any paralegals. We have a family law legal assistant, ANC is our civil legal assistant, and we have an immigration legal assistant. So those are the three big ones we have, and then we have Tanya, who provides support for our social benefit advocacy team. And so we've typically not had paralegals, because we also, we're a learning agency, so we have lots of students, as Diana knows. We have lots of students. And so generally our law students, so whether they're articling students or our clinical law students who come to our agency from September to April, or our summer students who are generally all law students, much of the sort of paralegal work, per se, would go to those students for their learning. And so then we have the legal assistants who do a little bit more of the administrative tasks. And so our agency is just set up slightly differently. However, we do see a value in having paralegals in our agency, but because we have the students and we are a non-profit, so funding does become a challenge, we haven't been able to offer those opportunities as of yet. Now that may change in the future, because we do, I think especially if they're regulated, then maybe our students can focus more on the legal advice and meeting with client piece rather than the filling out forms. So right now our students are the ones who do that form filling and write affidavits for clients and stuff. In the future, potentially, I think especially if it is regulated, then there's a little bit more control put in place around what that looks like than maybe. But right now I don't, if they were regulated tomorrow, I don't know that that would change much for us right now. Do you have anything to add to that? No, I think that's basically what we were talking. We were talking about how we could see the value, but the students kind of fill that role at the moment. If they were to regulate, let's say, in the future, how do you think they are going to try to implement this with people who already are in the paralegal role? How do you think that would change in the workforce? Sorry, I'm just trying to, there we go. How they would try to kind of implement it for people who are already working in there? I understand for whoever's coming into it, but how do you think that would change? Would their assignments get restricted then until they had certain certification? Do you think it would be a negative kind of impact for people who are in the role itself? Yeah, we were talking about this as well, where like right now, the range of duties that paralegals have probably varies greatly from firm to firm, right? And so depending on the limitations placed on paralegals through regulation, their roles may change substantially. They may not change at all. And everybody is coming from a different educational background, right? So some people have trained to be specifically paralegals. Some people have trained to be legal assistants and work their way up. Some people trained in a totally irrelevant field and kind of work their way up. And so it's, I'm not sure how it would look. I think it would really differ based on the individuals and the structures the firms have in place already for paralegals, how they're supervised and what their roles entail. I think the scope is too broad on both sides right now. Yeah. Well, I think it depends. So whoever the body is going to be that regulates paralegals, it will depend on how they implement the regulation. So for example, so I am a registered social worker. So I have my BSW from a QIN. And so you have, so we have a regulatory body. And so in order for me to call myself a registered social worker, I have to be registered with my accrediting body. And that requires that I have a degree or a diploma in Alberta. But I have to have a degree. I have to have completed a certain number of practice hours in order to be considered registered. And then I have to carry my own insurance. So I have to pay for insurance annually. I pay fees for my regulating body. In Alberta, it's a little bit different. So for example, you have human ecology students, right? They can work as social workers because social work and human ecology are very similar fields. But they can't call themselves a social worker. So until we had a regulatory body, they would call themselves social workers. And so anyone can be a social worker. And so I think that a human ecology student can become a social worker, but I think there's an exam that they have to take or some sort of to prove that they can do the job as a social worker. And so it's not saying that you have to have a BSW to do this. Or for paralegal, you don't have to go to get your diploma or your degree, but that there would be some sort of challenge exam or something. So if they implement that, then that's helpful for the current paralegals. Whether they want to go through with that or not is a whole other question. Right? It's not fair to them if you've been working as a paralegal for 15 years and now they're going to get a degree. Exactly. That's the big thing. Yeah. No, we agree. And that is similar. I used to work in the condo industry and condominium managers were recently regulated. And so people who had been working as condo managers, they had a certain time period in which they had to take a course and then pass an exam. And then they would have a certain amount of time if they didn't pass that first exam to kind of rewrite the exam and pass. Otherwise they couldn't designate themselves as, I can't remember the exact designation, but there was like a nine month period in which they could do the course and do the exam. So they had a lot of time to prepare. They knew it was coming down the pipe and then they had time to get that designation. And then if they didn't, then the profession they had been working in for years, they wouldn't be able to. Right. But even then, if you have to take classes or a course or something like that, that would be outside your time too. So you'd be doing your job, I would assume, and then doing the courses afterward. How would that look? That's a lot of extra time outside that you're not getting paid for. Time that's taken away from your family. Or if it is during your hours, then that's stuff that you're not doing at the job that still needs to get done. Yeah. And it's something that could potentially benefit the employer because if you have the registered designation, you might be able to charge more for their time. Right? So it may be in the employer's best interest to allow time for their employees to work on that during work hours. And why do you guys think that regulation hasn't happened yet in Alberta? Because it's Alberta? We're just, like, you know. Honestly, I don't know. We know that it's been talked about for such a long time. So it's like, why is it just being talked about? Why has nothing really changed or been accomplished yet? I think partly because it did need to be. And so there's a push now. In our agency, we know that accessing justice is a barrier. Right? There are so many barriers to accessing justice for our clients. And so I think if you can have, like, if I can pay a paralegal to do the work that I need done so that I can still represent myself in court as opposed to paying for a lawyer because we know that most people cannot afford a lawyer. So even I think of myself, there's no way I could afford a lawyer. And I'm fairly well paid for the role that I do, but lawyers are so expensive. It's so out of the realm of what most of us can afford. But if I go to a paralegal and have that done, it's much more costly. I can trust the information. So if you regulate it, I can trust that you know how to do your job and you're going to do it right. Then I can access the justice system again. So I think that's why the push now is because the cost of lawyers is too high. I think that's part of the reason now. I think that's a big consensus that we've noticed, at least in researching this, that that is one of the main reasons. It's to protect the people but also have the availability for the justice to be able to go ahead and continue in. Any other questions? Do you have any other specific questions? No, I think we already covered. Okay. I would like to ask you probably the last question if you want to say something about it or at least your opinion. How do you think it will affect the lawyers? Do you think the lawyers will agree with this? Because it's kind of reduced the amount of work or the available time and clients and everything that they already have. Because as we know, it is our system. It is centric, lawyer-centric, for saying it in some way. But it will be reduced, right? So I don't know how they feel or if they will agree. What do you think? Well, I think that when paralegal time can be used towards the time-consuming aspects of a file, drafting documents, communicating with the client and all of that takes a lot of time for the lawyer. If paralegals take that aspect, the lawyers can take on a lot more files, right? So you can have one lawyer supervising multiple paralegals and the lawyer's time is now reduced to reviewing documents, research. More of the nitty-gritty. The nitty-gritty, right? The things that are actually needed to be done by a lawyer that can't be done by someone else. And so you potentially have tripled the number of files you can have. So there are lawyers who don't like to delegate. And so that's tough because they want to do everything themselves. But I think there is money for lawyers in delegating to paralegals. Okay. Yeah, because we were wondering how they would feel it. If there would be a negative impact, then maybe that is one of the barriers of why it's taken so long. But no, that's a good insight. Well, we want to thank you. But we really appreciate just a different side, a different insight into the paralegal world and what this question kind of would affect. Because it is a big question. I don't think it could happen soon. I think there's a lot of things that still need to be worked on. Like I said, I think the scope is too big on both sides of what paralegals see when the definition is there and how you would even begin to attempt to regulate that when you can't even have the correct definition across the board. But it's really nice to see different sides. Because what you see on articles can always be, I don't know, it's not always the full truth. Or they don't always know as well because they're not in it. They're not working in it every day. So we really do appreciate your input and your conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us today. Yeah, thank you very much. You're very welcome, Lana. Thank you, Liza. Let us know. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you. Take care. Bye.