Any Paralegals on the Board?
I’ve been thinking about training as one, & starting a second, late-life career.
Tell me about it.
Didn’t you do this recently?
Anyway, I’ve been a paralegal for 15 years. I hate it now. That work is fine, and sometimes quite interesting, but what happens, particularly in smaller firms is that, once you get a lot of experience, you’ll get a lot more work, some if not most over the border into legal work. But you’ll still get paid as a paralegal, and work twice as hard, while the lawyer goes on multiple vacations and conferences in Vegas, The Virgin Islands and Alaska.
Every lawyer I’ve known is a cheap bastard, and pay is lousy for the skill levels expected at higher levels. Every paralegal school I’ve had experience with is crappy and expensive, and teaches almost no practical skills.
I’d look elsewhere.
OK, one experience.
Any others?
BTW–I was looking into schools.
Not a paralegal, but a lawyer. My wife - also a lawyer, used to teach paralegal studies at a community college.
I would not recommend it as a career. The main reason is that you will always be a HUGE step below the lawyers you work with. In some cases, the lawyers will appreciate the added value you bring to the firm. But in far too many cases you will be treated as a second class citizen, to generate profit for the lawyers.
I could name many many paralegals who thought they would be doing interesting legal work - research, drafting documents, etc. When you graduate, you may have little choice as to who hires you, and may find yourself doing essentially clerical work.
I have no idea what the job market and pay rates are for paralegals. There are several areas of legal work that are increasingly being done by non-attorneys. If you wanted to angle towards that type of situation, you might get more satisfaction.
I think one would have at least as much chance for job satisfaction and success as a talented secretary, administrative assistant, or office manager. Just my opinion.
There is probably no reason to go to school for it unless you plan to work in a field where paralegal services are a “standalone product” (there aren’t many). If you’ve got a degree in something (IIRC you already do), you probably have all the hard qualifications you will need for most paralegal jobs.
Bear in mind that the term is a bit amorphous anyway. In some places, paralegal is a synonym for legal assistant. In others, it differentiates between people who produce work product under a lawyer’s supervision versus people who assist lawyers.
As far as I can tell, Tennessee has no officially recognized paralegal certification program so you wouldn’t even need to go to school to qualify for that.
Since you asked for personal experiences: I like it. I don’t love it, though, and I only did it to help me decide whether to go to law school. IMHO, whether or not you enjoy being a paralegal will depend almost entirely on the lawyer(s) you work for and the field(s) they practice in (read: do not, under any circumstances, get involved with a firm that handles Social Security adjudications. It’s boring as fuck.)
LOL! My career the past 27 years! Boring as fuck, but a lot of folk (lawyers and non) make awfully nice coin at it.
Thought you’d appreciate the shout-out. 
I figured since the OP was looking for a “late life” career change he’d be more interested in enjoying the job than making money at it.
We have a few paralegals at our firm. We pay them well. In reality, however, the job is a much, or more, legal secretary as it is paralegal. They do get to work with some wonderful lawyers. So, that’s a plus. We have some that are “certified” paralegals, and some that don’t have official training. I would think that it would make a huge difference where you end up working. There is a wide variety of law practices out there. One of our paralegals formerly worked at a firm where she handled cases pretty much independently. (I worry about the lawyers who allowed this).
Before law school, I worked as a legal assistant at an AmLaw 100 / Vault 50 law firm here in Chicago. I am a lawyer now.
Some rando points…
(1) I loved it. My firm had a pretty collegial culture (perhaps too collegial, there were a handful lawyer-staff assignations), although it was also known as a sweatshop. The firm had (and still has) a highly-regarded litigation practice, so when the attorneys you supported were at trial, you could expect a few months of 60-80 weeks. We got overtime. Which leads to…
(2) After two years there, in 2005, I was on track to make around $55 thousand (inclusive of overtime). That’d be about $64 thousand in today’s dollars. Of course, the firm follows market for attorney salaries, so brand-new associates start at $160 thousand. There’s that stratification Dinsdale mentioned.
(3) While my firm took pride in fostering good attorney-paralegal relations (joint open-bar happy hours weekly), weirdly the legal secretaries were not included. (I don’t know if they were formally excluded (which I doubt), discouraged from attending by unwritten rules, or just wanted to bounce at the end of the week). I’ve also heard of other firms where there is a very real upstairs-downstairs ethos (complete with separate lunchrooms for attorneys and staff).
(4) To become a paralegal at my firm, you basically needed a degree from Chicago, Northwestern, or the better-ranked Big Ten schools (Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan). (There were a couple exceptions, but they were certainly outliers.) A paralegal certificate might actually hurt, since there is a healthy measure of elitism at these firms.
(5) I know someone who works as a corporate in-house paralegal, it pays well (although not quite so hot as BigLaw) and has virtually no overtime. The work is most reconciling outside counsel’s bills though.
(6) My work was actually fairly interesting about 40% of the time, which in law is a good ratio.
(7) At a larger firm, associates need to make billables, so you don’t get the “doing attorney work for paralegal pay” issue that Sateryn76 faces (at least, only very seldom). I understand this is much more likely at smaller firms.
(8) I would totes do it again. Open-bar every Friday night and a storied Xmas party. Plus one year, the staff gift was the notorious ______ & _____ sweatsuit (a set of a sweatshirt and sweatpants emblazoned with the firm’s name that we all got from the firm). On the other hand, I only did it for two years, so not long enough for any real dissatisfaction to materialize.
Thanks. Just make sure you don’t get that one ALJ. I hear he’s a real asshole! 
Worked in lots of law firms.
Most paralegals hate it. They do 90% of the work and get 10% of the pay of the lawyers.
If all goes well, the lawyers get bonuses.
If the shit hits the fan, the paralegals get blamed and have extra work do do - late nights - while the lawyers scurry home and expect to see everything copied, filed and ready in the morning when they saunter in and say, “Oh, and bring me some coffee from Starbucks - you know what I like.”
Paralegal = Abused Spouse
About three years ago I went back to school and got my paralegal certificate. I already had an MA in history. I didn’t want to go to law school, but I thought my background in writing and research would come in handy as a paralegal. It definitely has.
I’ve had two paralegal jobs so far. I used to work with an in-house legal department at a large financial services firm. Then I moved to a different city and started working at a small general practice firm. They are vastly different jobs. The corporate legal job paid way better and was generally not as stressful. I miss it dearly. But I’m getting much more experience in different areas of law at the smaller firm.
Yes, a lot of the work is clerical. But the attorneys at my firm also make an effort to give me billable work which includes drafting, proofreading, and research. I don’t mind that I’m not getting paid as much as an attorney. They are very careful about supervising my work and making sure that I’m not actually practicing law or giving legal advice.
For the most part I like it, although it can be very stressful. A lot of it depends on the personality of the attorney(s) you’re working for. If you get along well, it’s great. If you don’t, it’s a nightmare.
Amen brother. I’ve been here far too long, and know too many other paralegals well, to not recognize that this is true. Sure, maybe in cities there are big firms where people get T-shirts and party every Friday, but in the vast majority of the medium and small towns, this is what a paralegal is.
Another negative I’m thinking about right now, at work as a paralegal - you get a big “paralegal” job, like reviewing and marking medical records for a deposition on Monday. On Monday afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., you have the lawyer wander in and ask for something to be emailed for them, or to draft a quick pleading, or for you to pull a quick assessor search, or whatever. Constantly. So you have your “own work” that you’re supposed to complete, which is often complex, and then you’re interrupted a million times for small bullshit that a reasonably smart toddler could do. And a lawyer would never do it themselves, that’s why they have a “staff”. And everything is always due ASAP and no accounting is made for everything else you have to do.
Seriously guys - after two straight weeks of chucking my regular work to the wind and being put under tremendous stress to finish an emergency Chapter 11 and the associated issues so an attorney could go on two small vacations, both this week and last week, I’m done. I’m putting in my notice Monday.
And watch out for this re: billable hours - Attorney has you draft a Complaint. It takes you 45 minutes, which is your case includes the fun stuff (Reviewing the file, etc.) and the bullshit (typing). Reviews for a minute and a half, then you trot back to type some changes and get it filed. Attorney bills your work under his/her name. They get credit for the billable time, and you get jammed. Happens all the time. :mad:
See, at my firm the paralegals get billable work under their own names. It makes a huge difference.
I do too. I bill all the time. But, it often gets changed when the bills come out. :rolleyes:
This is true everywhere. Theoretically, I was billed out at $100/hr as a paralegal, but no partner is going to ask a client to pay for work done by clerical staff (and no client will ever do so without raising a huge hue and cry). Clients, not without justice, think that should be firm overhead. None of my (or any other staffer’s) hours appeared on the final bill.
I wouldn’t take it personally, it’s just a fact about the legal sector. And on the flip side, you don’t have to do collections (another partner task). Or worry about what happens to your PPP when your book of business isn’t paying up.
There are paralegals, and there are paralegals. I’ve been an immigration paralegal for nearly 15 years, and I told my first firm going in that if they thought of a paralegal as a legal secretary, I wasn’t so interested, but if they thought of a paralegal as a junior attorney, then I was. I’ve never heard of a paralegal program that teaches immigration, so most people come in essentially by apprenticeship (I’d had some related experience in refugee resettlement, more on the vocational counseling side, had worked as an interpreter in Immigration Court, and spoke a couple of languages and had a degree and a brain, so they hired me and I basically learned on the job). I do a fair amount of filling out forms, but also a good bit of research and writing and communicating with clients – and that the filling out of forms also involves a fair bit of legal knowledge and knowing how to issue-spot. Lately we are getting more new cases than we know what to do with, so I’ve been doing the bulk of new case intake and issue-spotting (rather than the lawyers – another very senior paralegal does similar work, but she knows about different kinds of immigration issues than I do, so case assignments depend a lot on skillset and/or language expertise around here).
It’s never boring around here – I may be called upon to research everything from the current state of Albanian blood feuds , to whether someone whose divorce wasn’t final until after she married her current husband is still legally married, to what the requirements (and logistics) are for legitimating a child in Bumblefuck, Mexico, to what it takes to lose and/or acquire Latvian nationality if one left before Latvian independence.
I agree wholeheartedly with those who said that the nature of your job depends a lot on the culture of the firm and whether the attorneys treat you like a person with a brain. After all this time, I make a decent salary – nothing close to what a lawyer with my level of experience would make, but then I don’t have law school loans to pay off, or a billable hours requirement. The attorneys I work for may annoy the crap out of me at times, but they do treat me like an intelligent human being and respect my knowledge and trust me to know when an issue needs their attention. That counts for a lot.
I often do collections if I worked on a case, and especially if I speak the same language as the client. I hate it, but there you go.
Our paralegals get good bonuses. But they do work late when necessary and get me coffee when I ask 
As I said up thread, the job of a paralegal varies greatly depending on the office.
I wish. I was actually completely in charge of all of our collection files, from prepping pleadings to taking all calls. And just recently I got a 50% work load increase because we had to downsize as our client base is drying up. We needed to free up money for the car payments and corporate credit card for the attorneys to use.
In any case, as to the OP, if you decide to do this, be very careful where you end up.