[Moderator Note]
**St. Anger, **insults against other posters, even indirect ones, are not permitted in General Questions or any other forum outside the Pit. Don’t do this again.
In the future, if you want to dispute other posters’ positions let’s do so on a factual basis, rather than taking potshots at them.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I was a paralegal for a large law firm, then for a hospital, then a contract paralegal.
Here are some of the things I did:
For the large firm: Legal research, shepherdizing, cite checking, indexing (basically organizing documents in large, cumbersome cases in notebooks so that they could be found quickly. We had a program that did this, some kind of database program, I don’t remember its name. We scanned documents, entered the pertinent stuff in the database so we could find the document later.) Proofread documents. We had a proofreading department, but they could get backlogged.
Once, editing down a 130-page brief to 60 pages so as not to piss off the judge. (That took all weekend.)
About half the things I did at the law firm were billed to clients. Paralegals did not have a set number of billable hours they had to meet, but lawyers did.
Paralegals did get overtime. A paralegal working about the same hours as a first- or second-year associate (60-90 hours per week) might actually get paid more than the associate, who did not get OT. A couple of paralegals with many years of experience got paid more than new associates even without the OT.
Other paralegals did other things. Most of the law librarians were paralegals, although the head guy had a JD and an MLS.
One paralegal did nothing but go to the state house every day and get fact sheets on the status of new bills going through the legislature, then arrange to have them copied and distributed every day to lawyers and paralegals who had signed up for information on specific issues. This guy worked a lot of OT when the legislature was in session.
For the hospital: I worked there for 3 mergers, and I did contract review as part of due diligence, along with other stuff like checking to make sure all company vehicles had titles we could find and up-to-date plates. I collected documents for the paralegals on the other side of the merger to review.
Basically about every three months I got sent off-site to review documents, in many cases along with the junior attorney. We went through every contract and wrote down various pertinent details.
I did a lot of research on various things, and it was fact-finding research which sometimes involved calling people up, but most often involved getting records of one kind or another (medical, financial) out of wherever they were.
I kept corporate books for the hospital’s entities and went through them periodically to make sure everything that needed to be done (annual meetings, etc.) was being done. And if it hadn’t been, I made sure it was, and that there were records of it in the books.
I kept a database of contracts for the hospital and notified my boss when they were about to expire, so they could be renegotiated. (Same database program as the merger database.) On several occasions, I sat down with the practitioner to answer questions about the contract. If the questions veered into actual legal advice, I had to call in my boss, but they usually didn’t. Giving someone the definition of something in their contract is not considered legal advice.
I did a lot of legal writing. Here’s one example: Some company sent a letter telling our hospital to cease and desist its use of a certain phrase, as they had trademarked that phrase. I wrote the first response to the letter, but under my boss’s signature, saying essentially that we would look into it. Then I checked our records and the other company’s claim and found out that we had also trademarked the name, were using it before they trademarked it, and were using it internally, in an extremely limited way–so I drafted another letter telling them that we had no intention of ceasing and desisting and very politely telling them they could stuff it–and my boss sent that one out, intact, under her signature as well.
Contract paralegal. This had a tendency to be very weird, boring stuff, but the company I contracted through paid $20/hour. I only remember two of them. One was going through back issues of old newspapers on microfilm, looking for advertising by or stories about a certain couple of companies, and printing out the pertinent pages (making sure the date was on it somewhere). The odd thing was that it was for REALLY old newspapers–from 1962 to 1965. I know it was for litigation but I have no clue what the case was about.
The other one was looking through many, many notebooks for something. In that case one law firm had made a discovery request. The other law firm had complied by copying damn near everything they had, in the hopes that in that huge mountain of paper nobody would ever find the thing that had been requested. I found it. But boy, was that ever tedious. (This is approximate, but there were about 20 of the largest size looseleaf notebooks, with 1000 pages or so in each one, and the law firm decided that, if the information they had sought was not in there, then none of these pages would have to be Bates stamped. I found it in the 8th notebook I went through, so—I had been through more than 7000 pages, and they were pages with columns of figures on them. Then, when I found it, nobody was very happy, because now they had to Bates stamp the lot. Even though it was a key document in their case, they weren’t very happy. I think they just wanted that case to go away.)
I was brought in as a paralegal in a nine-attorney firm, but the title was very much a catch-all. I have a lot of technical experience, so my primary duties were performing background research and witness locations for cases (I worked for a private investigator prior to going to the law firm), organizing electronic discovery and performing some light IT work. The firm’s focus was white collar criminal defense, so the work load was different than a lot of other paralegals might experience anyway. I also participated in witness interviews, primarily for note-taking and writing summary reports later, but I also asked questions and participated in other ways. In addition, I spent a lot of time going to the local courthouses to retrieve dockets and copies of case documents (they usually preferred sending me over using messengers/document retrieval services because I became familiar with the courts and could maneuver well when something we needed wasn’t easily available).
My firm now is part of a much larger firm (about 500 attorneys) with multiple offices and large practice groups in antitrust and civil litigation, among others. Even though I’m still part of the White Collar practice group and handle many of the same duties as before, now I end up involved in assisting other practice groups with their work, too. Along with the other white collar paralegal in the office, I’m being trained on cite-checking and Shepardizing – activities that I was never part of in the smaller firm. I’ll even be involved in traveling across the country soon to visit client sites and participate in document collection/preservation activities. This is all good news for me because business in the white collar world can come and go without any regularity.
Further, our LA office now has somewhere between 20-25 attorneys and is growing by the week, but we still don’t have a full-time in-house IT person, so I still get to handle some of those duties, as well. And, because I’m the only male “staff member” in the office, I still get asked to help people move boxes and furniture all the time. I get paid very well, so I don’t gripe (much).
When I first started this job and people used to ask me what a paralegal did, I used to say that I didn’t know because I wasn’t considered a typical paralegal. But the more years I spend doing this and the more people I meet in the business, the more I’m convinced that there really isn’t such a thing as a “typical” paralegal.
As background, I’ve had this job for just shy of eight years, and I do not have a college degree.
[cynic]From a client’s position, a paralegal should have done everything at a paralegal rate that the lawyer did and billed at a lawyer’s rate, unless the client lost, in which case the lawyer should have done all the work rather than the paralegal.[/cynic]
A suggestion for the resume, since you asked about putting something other than “Graduate Student”:
For my first year in graduate school, I was a Teaching Assistant. Then I got a fellowship that required me to not have another job: one of its very few conditions is that people on that fellowship are not allowed to teach a class. The new title was Research Assistant. I think people who aren’t familiar with graduate schools, fellowship requirements and so forth may like “Research Assistant” better than “Graduate Student.”
You know, I’m wondering if I know what firm you’re at. Care to PM me and tell me? I’m in New York, a million miles away, and I’m not looking for your real name or any personal details. Just think I might recognize the firm from your description.
I got disillusioned with philosophy (not the books, the live people) and ended up working as a paralegal. A couple of tips:
-Paralegal work can range from 100% clerical work like typing documents and answering phones to 100% writing arguments. To get work more towards the ‘writing arguments’ end of the spectrum, you must work very hard, both in selecting your employer and also in your relationship with your employer. This is in addition to the actual writing work. There are lots of paralegals who are always trying to get brief writing work but never do. If you want writing work, you will have to stay on your toes and work at it a little until you find your way. Not being coy, just couldn’t possibly explain without a lot of analysis beyond the scope of this post.
-Moreover, neither paralegals nor lawyers spend a significant amount of their time analyzing issues of lasting interest or significance. The facts of most lawsuits are unpoetic, and do not usually illuminate general truths about justice or The Good. You have to be interested in the actual construction of arguments, interpretation of laws, etc. for its own sake and not as a means to philosophical insight. Of course it helps to work in a field where you feel empathy for the clients, this way you gain satisfaction from achieving justice in a particular case.
-You do need at least some legal experience in order to get any paralegal job that doesn’t suck. Therefore, get whatever job in a law office you can find and stick with it for a year. Don’t worry about the pay the first year. Seek additional responsibility whenever possible. Then, after a year, seek the kind of paralegal work you want, either from your current employer or by finding another job.
-Lawyers fancy themselves to be good negotiators and do not seem to have a lot of shame about trying to trick their staff into accepting inappropriately low salaries. Don’t believe what anyone tells you about salaries. Look on the website for the federal bureau of labor statistics and look carefully at the statistics for paralegals and other legal support in your geographic area. My last paralegal salary was about 70k, although that was with many years experience and in Southern California, where the cost of living is very high.
Good luck.
Hmm. Maybe you just got your degree from the wrong school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_p0CgPeyA