Some common paralegal jobs in corporate departments include positions like “transactional real estate paralegal,” “contracts manager,” “corporate paralegal,” “legal assistant,” “commercial litigation assistant,” “legal analyst,” “subpoena paralegal,” “litigation paralegal,” “intellectual property paralegal,” “securities paralegal,” “executive assistant,” “commercial loan closer,” etcetera. Also, there are several industry sectors like real estate where closing the deal almost always requires the answering of legal queries, and in such industries it is not common for paralegals to work in the jobs of marketing or sales representatives conjointly with other marketing and sales professionals.
In corporate legal departments that are traditional and have big legal departments, the paralegal is usually part of a team led by and supervised an in-house attorney or general corporate counsel. The paralegal is the legal, secretarial, and personal assistant in the workflow of the legal team headed by the corporate counsel. He or she is expected to do all the work that a legal associate might be expected to do in a law firm, and more. A paralegal in a corporate environment would be normally doing:
- Legal research
- Primary drafting of documents
- Clause analysis of deeds and documents
- Legal compliance work
- Document work related with transactions
- Document work related with litigation
- Document work related with pre-litigation
- All work related with compliance and submission of required documents to state and statutory authorities
In smaller firms, paralegals would also work as in-house consultants and take part in meetings where their opinion on transactional matters and strategy formation is sought at a primary level before the opinion of attorneys is sought.
Right now, the maximum number of jobs for paralegals is available in the real estate sector, which is ailing, downsizing, can't do without legal work, and trying to substitute in-house attorneys with in-house paralegals. In fact, if one follows the economy, this trend of substituting in-house attorneys with paralegals to do the grunt work is increasing as corporate firms realize that paralegals are people who begin with the mindset of “working under” as opposed to law school graduates, who begin with the mindset of “working independent.”