The World of the Working Paralegal

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.

Traditional


You must know what harbor you are making for to find employment as a paralegal. The first challenge is to know what winds will take you to what jobs.

Paralegals must understand what it is they will be working at and what they will be doing after they are hired. Those engaged in a paralegal job hunt must master a special language that is derived from the various modes of legal employment you will encounter during your search. Often, those who fail to achieve employment have failed to understand the language of the paralegal job descriptions that were discussed in their interviews.

Assumptions, Expectations, Apprehensions, and Misinformation

Nothing dims the prospect of success like going into a new job with a head full of bad information, wishful thinking, questionable assumptions, and unrealistic expectations. You may have assumptions and expectations that are based upon any number of sources, all of which could contain a mix of accuracy and inaccuracy. In describing practice areas and jobs, we will discuss how much time is spent on word processing, in public contact, in "the back room" handling involved research projects or large litigation support tasks, or on the phone. It is important to know not only what legal activity you will be working on, but also how your time will be divided. Those who become working paralegals do not:

• Talk about how much they love public contact when they will be doing multi-document litigation support
• Emphasize their high grades in legal research when they interview to do client intake for a bankruptcy practice
• Talk about how they have always wanted to "save the environment" to a firm representing a chemical company

Put your assumptions "on hold" until you find out about the basics of your prospective firm.

Is the firm:

• Plaintiff's practice or defense?
• Large or small?
• General or specialized?
• An employer of a large number of paralegals or a small number?
• Sophisticated in its use of paralegals or basic?
• A heavy user of computers or computer-phobic?
• One that grants paralegals public contact or little public contact?
• One that considers paralegals part of the professional staff or the nonprofessional staff?

Query, Query, Query

I do not intend to offer an exhaustive source of all paralegal job descriptions, but instead to give you an understanding of just how much different paralegal jobs will vary. This will hopefully raise your consciousness during the job search process so that you will "query, query, query." Keep your antennae out for key points about the particular working world you are trying to join. Paralegal skills are useful in a wide variety of settings. Find out about the specific job description for which you are applying and be sure the job meets your expectations.

For example, some paralegals want (and even crave) client contact. Others become paralegals so they do not have to deal with clients at all. One paralegal job may emphasize client contact and the other may virtually forbid it. It depends on the attitude of the boss, the community in which you live, the practice area, and whether the job involves the defendant or the plaintiff. Know what you are likely to get when you go hunting for it. Be sure to ask all you can about it before accepting it. And then once you have accepted a job, find out even more about it, and then fully embrace Before describing specific practice areas and focusing on paralegal duties within those practice areas, a look at the "real world" picture would be appropriate. Most paralegals are multiple or (general) practice area paralegals for two reasons:

1. Many law firms start out with generalist practices and grow to become specialists. Thus they need paralegals who can help in different areas.
    
2. Many specialist paralegals have grown into those categories after being exposed to a wide range of practice areas.

The fact that many paralegals are generalists goes straight to job search issues:

• Flexibility - Willingness to handle differing tasks in the same day
• Adaptability - Able to move skillfully and enthusiastically from basic to complex, team to individual tasks
• Enthusiasm for - Take on the unknown with a sense of adding new assignments venture; embrace the new
• Willingness to - Always ready to learn new software, redevelop new skills, search a new topic, delve into a new practice area; in short, do what's needed, even if it has not been handled before

Be interested in the employer's stated practice areas. Be enthusiastic about potential new assignments. The natural evolution of practice areas and firm development will tend to make you a multiple-practice-area paralegal.

In a five-year paralegal career, I handled many practice areas. In my first job, which lasted one year, I was hired to handle a basic plaintiff's bankruptcy practice, which grew into three other practice areas.

Job #1

• Original Role - Bankruptcy Paralegal
• Actual Role - Bankruptcy Paralegal, Domestic Relations
• Paralegal, Estates/Wills/Trusts Paralegal,
• Criminal Defense Paralegal

I left for a substantial pay increase to Job #2. At the second firm, the firm started with one paralegal (myself) and in a two-and-one-half year period grew to three additional attorneys and five more paralegals. The number of practice areas demonstrate the firm's rapid expansion.

Job #2

• Original Role - Products Liability/Personal Injury Paralegal
• (Asbestos cases)
• Actual Role - Products Liability/Personal Injury Paralegal, Mechanic's Lien Foreclosure Paralegal,

Domestic Paralegal, Criminal Defense Paralegal, Bankruptcy Paralegal (Creditor), Lender Liability Paralegal, Litigation Paralegal
This firm's partnership broke up, and I went on to a large law firm in Job #3. In this position, I was brought on to handle one large litigation case involving tens of thousands of documents. When that case was settled I went on to handle other cases in various practice areas.

Job #3

• Original Role - Litigation Support Paralegal
• Actual Role - Lit Support Paralegal, Lender Liability Paralegal, Commercial Paralegal, Intellectual Properties Paralegal, Personal Injury/Insurance Defense Paralegal

This brief outline of my paralegal career is very representative of the way law firms work. A paralegal is "on board" and, like a ship at sea, all hands contribute to the whole effort. It is not generally in a paralegal's self-interest to refuse work because of one's classification, even though in larger firms there is a "division of labor," and specialist paralegals are usually busy at their special practice, be it bankruptcy, foreclosures, litigation, corporate law, etc. Before specific paralegal duties are outlined, you must understand that any given paralegal may do one, two, three, four, or more of these job descriptions in any given year or in any given stay at a particular law firm or over the course of a career. It is a rare person indeed who is hired to do one particular job and then continues in that specialty area over a number of years.

Cultivating personal and professional viability

One other factor should be mentioned before we delve into the specialties. With the modern law firm and the nature of work flow being what they are, it behooves the working paralegal to have as broad an experience as possible while still maintaining an area of strength. Being able to say you have a strength or specialty is very important, but it is also helpful to be able to say you have had exposure to two or three other practice areas. Job leads are often accompanied with statements like: "I want a two-year paralegal with any kind of law office experience, and whatever Workers' Comp or personal injury experience they can muster up."

So as you proceed through this chapter, remember that if you fall in love with one practice area, you still have to be a useful member of a firm. Educate yourself, ask questions, and test out different job descriptions to see if they match your personality profile and work style. At the same time, stay flexible, be informed, and be ready to roll up your sleeves and handle tasks no matter what the practice area.

The Litigation Paralegal

One person recently asked me, "When people say 'litigation,' they're not talking about practice areas are they? They are talking about the process of settling the dispute, whatever that dispute is. Right?"

Yes. The litigation paralegal is a paralegal who assists attorneys in the formalized settling of a controversy between two or more parties. Civil litigation involves many subject areas. The issues could be contracts, a car wreck, an abandoned commercial development, a bankruptcy and foreclosure, a contractual dispute between an agent and a rock band, a commercial conflict between several parties, medical malpractice, torts of all kinds, and any other dispute that is settled in the courtroom. You can safely assume that as a paralegal, you will encounter litigation in your career. To know what lawyers are seeking in a paralegal, you can just look at what happens in the litigation process and find important clues. This is why we will delve into the litigation process.

The first thing to be said for the litigation process and the paralegal's role in it is that it is varied. It is stimulating to move from one subject matter to another, or to work with documents that may range from deeds of trust to mechanic's liens to wills to scribbles on a paper napkin to diaries, calendars, and love letters. It is the litigation paralegal who often gets first plugged in to database management and has to use one or two of several software programs (DBase IV, Paradox, Q&A, Lotus, and many others).

Database management

If you have no experience with any of the preceding software programs or others like them, be enthusiastic about the prospect of learning them when you become employed. Even better, figure out a way to get trained on these programs so that you can include them on your resume. The entry-level paralegal who can boast of this kind of experience has an advantage over other job candidates.

Several years ago, I was asked to begin performing data entry on a mechanic's lien case that had just been filed near Vail, Colorado. Two years and 75 defendants later, a small building was rented to house all of the documents that were generated in this suit. Inquisitive enthusiasm kept me on the case. By time of trial, I had become the "fact expert" on the failed multi-million dollar complex construction project. The use of computers had not reached the height of sophistication that it has today, but in that case (as in all cases) I started with a willingness to use the computer to my advantage, even if my "computer literacy" was not too high. Document imaging and other high-tech approaches to document management may be in store for us in the near future, but no matter what happens in litigation, there will always be a need for a talented, skilled, and enthusiastic litigation paralegal who is willing to become friendly with and talented in document management.

In cases that involve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of documents, whole teams can be involved. Some cases require only a few boxes of documents, while some class action suits have documents housed in warehouses and buildings, coded and labeled by floor, section, row, and box. In these latter cases, trained paralegals may be doing:

1. Document labeling
2. Document coding
3. Data entry
4. Quality control (checking others' work)
5. Document organization and indexing
6. Liaison with computer consultants and attorneys
7. Report production
8. Personnel supervision and team leading
9. Document reproduction

As a litigation paralegal, you may work in certain practice areas or firms that never require this kind of massive organizational effort, but the real point here is that the litigation paralegal is in charge of document retrieval? No matter how small the case.
 
Some cases may only have 20 to 30 documents, but if the files are poorly organized and discovery is handled haphazardly, even those documents can become a problem for a paralegal.

You will be held responsible for the state of the documents involved in a litigated matter. If you are not given responsibility over the files, try to get that responsibility. A secretary who is managing the files may be happy to allow you take over that aspect of his or her job. If they view it as a treasured area of responsibility, ask if you can involve yourself in the indexing and labeling.

If you will be held responsible for it, try to take control of it.

The Law of Document Blindness: When an attorney is standing at the door red-faced, perspiring, with a strained countenance and a raspy voice-pleading for a certain key document, the optic nerve of the paralegal will become blind to the particular document requested, especially if that document is not in its proper place in the file because it is in the paralegal's right hand.
The Law of Document Blindness is an exaggeration of the state of affairs in a busy law office. Still, it is the litigation paralegal's absolute job requirement to not only label and index documents (or be responsible for this) but to be able to retrieve them quickly.