Interviewing and Investigating: Essentials Skills for the Legal Professional

Interviewing and Investigating: Essential Skills for the Paralegal, Eighth Edition, provides a thorough and practical approach to helping paralegal students establish a strong foundation in interviewing and investigating skills. And it does so by carefully placing that instruction in exactly the context of civil disputes, criminal prosecutions, and commercial business transactions where modern lawyers need assistants with those skills. The text contains materials to train students how to identify and locate witnesses, obtain vital information from both public and private sources, and how to arrange and conduct effective interviews of clients and witnesses, both in the office and in the field. The text uses not just explanations, examples, and illustrations, but realistic case studies with vetted student role-playing assignments to accomplish its pedagogical goals. The text with supporting materials is written by Stephen P. Parsons, an experienced practitioner, teacher, and author.

New to the Eighth Edition:

• A new feature, Keep in Mind, to emphasize, recap, and follow up on important points
• New coverage of genetic testing as a means of identifying or locating people
• New and freshened examples, hypotheticals, and Learn by Doing exercises
• Increased coverage on how to locate and obtain medical, educational, and employment records
• Updated Case Studies for use in student role playing activities
• Updated references to multiple online resources
• Updated references to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Evidence to reflect the latest amendments
• Continued emphasis on the latest developments in online social networking and communication technologies including public and private surveillance cameras and surveillance drones

Professors and students will benefit from:

• A dynamic pedagogy, including hypotheticals with questions, Learn by Doing exercises, chapter summaries, and basic review questions in every chapter
• Examples from civil, criminal, litigation, and non-litigation scenarios
• Emphasis on ethical and professional standards, integrated throughout the text and focused on in a chapter devoted to ethical issues
• Four realistic cases for analysis and use in the Learn by Doing exercises-homicide, personal injury, domestic relations, and a commercial real estate development project