When Gary Melhuish became president of the Legal Assistant Management Association, or LAMA, last week, he ventured where no man had gone before. The profession has long been dominated by women. But Mr. Melhuish has broken the glass ceiling. On Friday, he became the first man to head the organization in its twenty year history. One of the first items on his agenda is to change the organization's name. Mr. Melhuish, 45, said many believe the term "legal assistant" has been diluted. So LAMA's 550 members are voting to change the name to the International Paralegal Management Association. The problem with the title legal assistant, he said, is secretaries are using it. "From LAMA's perspective we want people to have a four year degree, what we think is a minimum educational standard," he said. "Now all of a sudden the term legal assistant is going to be applied to a legal secretary that may have years of experience but no college." LAMA is quite a small organization, because the field is still relatively young. Typically, only bigger firms hire legal assistant managers, such as Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson where Mr. Melhuish has worked for more than twenty years. Mr. Melhuish would like to see more firms of all sizes hire legal assistant managers to oversee paralegal operations within firms. He thinks managers with paralegal backgrounds are uniquely qualified to do the job. "Having a legal assistant manager is useful rather than having attorneys doing all this administrative work on supervising legal assistants," he said. "I just think from an economics point of view it would make more sense to have somebody at a lesser billing rate doing the work." Mr. Melhuish was always interested in the law, but said his early years in the profession were frustrating. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in history and could not find a job because of the recession. He decided to become a paralegal in 1981 and attended the Institute for Paralegal Training in Philadelphia. He got his 14-week paralegal certificate over the summer and joined a Philadelphia law firm in the fall. "I absolutely hated it," he said, adding that in retrospect the job was challenging, but just not fulfilling at that time in his life. So Mr. Melhuish quit and went to graduate school at Michigan State and earned a Masters in College and University Administration. "I spent two years at Michigan State running dormitories and decided that wasn't a real good future either," he said. So he returned to the paralegal profession and was hired by Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. Although he has been there for twenty years, Mr. Melhuish said it took him about five years to realize he liked working in the paralegal field. A big part of his professional fulfillment, he said, comes from networking organizations such as LAMA and through teaching. "I think that was the peace I had to make with myself about being a paralegal was yes you only get to be at a certain level at a law firm, but do you really want to be at that next level? I knew by looking at the attorneys I didn't want to do what they were doing," he said. "I'm a very good employee. I don't have that entrepreneurial bent to hunt down business. It's just not who I am." But teaching and training new paralegals is something he loves. As an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Legal Assistant program, Mr. Melhuish teaches legal ethics and legal technology. He is also a frequent speaker at legal conferences, such as the Paralegal Super Conferences. Mr. Melhuish, who also renovates and sells houses in his spare time, said the conferences help him keep up with the latest trends in the legal field and implement them at his firm. He manages a team of 19 paralegals in the litigation practice. He said managing paralegals from different departments, such as tax and corporate, makes sense because he can transfer people around easily since he knows who is busy and who has free time. It is better for the paralegals too, he added, because they get varied experience and are not pigeon holed in one particular area of law. He said many paralegals are concerned about debates on overtime pay and the outsourcing of legal work to India and other countries. Firms will continue to pay overtime, he said, even if Congress and the Department of Labor decide paralegals should or should not pay them overtime. "At the end of the day it's a market decision of who we want to pay overtime to," he said. Cutting overtime pay would result in the need to hire more paralegals, which doesn't make economic sense, he said. As for fears of outsourcing legal work, Mr. Melhuish thinks people are overreacting. "My attorneys don't like to work with a paralegal half way across the building. I can't imagine them wanting their work being done in India," he said. "The things that I'm reading about how this is growing so much tend to be from the people who own the companies that are trying to sell this product." Another trend Mr. Melhuish sees for paralegals is good news for gadget lovers. He thinks the legal profession will become more and more connected and that paralegals will be given laptops and Blackberry's. "I think that we're going to see more electronic ties to the office," he said. "I used to have to go back to the hotel at the end of the day and review all my emails. Now I can handle things as they're coming up and I don't feel, well I feel much less stressed being on the road now that I have a Blackberry."

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