Appropriate for courses in ethics for paralegals, legal assistants, or legal secretaries at the undergraduate level. Also appropriate as a supplement in an Introduction to Law course or an in-house training program.

Top Ten Rules for Paralegals presents a straightforward upbeat approach to developing an understanding of professional responsibility in the field of law.  Common everyday ethical issues in the real world of law are discussed in a conversational “plan English” style designed to make concepts more accessible and interesting for the student. 

Specifically designed for today's paralegal students, Top Ten Rules was written by a leading authority in field of paralegal ethics, Deborah Orlik. It is a distillation of over 20 years of legal study and practical use of the rules of professional responsibility as a paralegal.  This is the author's sixth book on the subject, however, this book takes a different, less dry, approach to the subject. The author warns the students to be prepared to use their own morality to test their threshold of right and wrong while discussing the scenarios presented in the book.  The object is to place the readers in a realistic workplace context involving an ethical issue and ask them to use their newly gained knowledge of the law and of their own morality to work through the problem.  This course of study will give them an opportunity to explore their feelings and opinions and get them ready to deal with issues on the job.

No one book can provide the answers to all ethical issues.  But this text will give the student a starting place.  By the end of this course of study they should be able to: 1) identify an ethical issue; 2) put it into a general category - one of the Top Ten rules; and 3) know where to start researching the answer to any ethical issue.