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Hire This Sharp-Eyed Paralegal Graduate

By Lynne DeVenny

I hope that a lucky area employer has snapped up new paralegal graduate Tabatha James, of Alpharetta, Georgia. If she lived in Oklahoma, I bet personal injury attorney Ed Abel would give her an interview, after she uncovered a website using his photograph - and his firm's success stories - to masquerade as a legitimate legal employer.

James is to be commended for going the extra mile. When she applied for a legal job posted on Craigslist, and got a response asking for her credit card information, she could have just ignored the email and not pursued the matter any further. Instead, she took a closer look at the sham website (not currently available as of this posting), and discovered that Abel's photo and other information from his law firm was being used to make the credit card scam seem legitimate.

The article at CBSAtlanta.com doesn't directly say what happened next, but I am going to assume that James took the initiative and contacted Abel's firm with her discovery. Earlier this week, the firm was working to close down the fraudulent website, and seems to have been successful as of the date of this post.

I'm glad the local news media picked up on this story, so that James' experience can help other job seekers and new graduates avoid costly Internet scams.

She wants people to be aware that scams are everywhere and to make sure certain things on job postings are clear, such as a contact number, e-mail and address for the business. In this case, all of that information on the Craigslist ad was missing.

"I have a lot of classmates that were as excited as I was to start work, and I don't want anyone to fall prey to this," James said.

I know this goes without saying, but this is a tough economy and desperate times sometimes trump good sense. If any employer asks for your credit card information, you're not likely to get a job out of it.

There is a well done LinkedIn profile for a Tabatha James in Atlanta, who is a 2010 graduate of Emory University's Paralegal Certificate program. I'm assuming (until one of you tells me otherwise) they are one and the same. Kudos to James for her research and initiative; she sounds like she will be a terrific paralegal.

Source: CBSAtlanta.com

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on August 17, 2010 (boomark / email).