The Everything Guide to Being a Paralegal is the ideal handbook for new paralegals, professionals looking to further or reevaluate their careers, or those considering the profession.Tackling the concerns of real law professionals, chapters include:
Paralegal Career Options
Paralegal Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Pre-Trial Preparation
Individual chapter attention to the top types of law practice
More and more people are opting for a career as a paralegal-and this book is their pathway to success in this growing field!
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Being a “para legal” — working beside those in the high-profile legal profession — sounds challenging, exciting, putting one in the middle of the action. The paralegal field is all of that and more — it is client relations, teamwork, and problem solving. Simply put, a paralegal is a lawyer's assistant. Paralegals are specifically educated and trained to perform legal tasks delegated to them by a lawyer, tasks that require specific legal knowledge greater than that possessed by the typical legal secretary. Understanding the key aspects of the paralegal profession is the first step in determining if becoming a paralegal is right for you.
Why Consider Becoming a Paralegal?
If you are considering the paralegal field as a career choice, you probably want to know why others have become paralegals, and whether their expectations were fulfilled. While every paralegal has their own personal reasons for entering the field, three of the most common reasons are job growth, job satisfaction, and variety of work.
Job Growth
The paralegal field offers one of the fastest-growing employment opportunities in the United States. A 2002 Bureau of Labor Statistics report estimated that there are more than 200,000 practicing paralegals in the United States. The same report projected a ten-year increase in the number of paralegals by 28.7 percent. By the year 2012, there will be more than 257,000 practicing paralegals.
The projected growth in the paralegal field is the outgrowth of an ever-increasing demand for the use of paralegals from clients. Over the last fifty years, the hourly rate has become the standard for legal billing. At the same time, clients have experienced an increase in the overall cost of legal services. As the cost of legal services continued to rise, clients looked for ways to save money. A properly trained paralegal is able to deliver many of the same legal services as a lawyer, but at a lower cost.
ssential
Hourly rates for paralegals are approximately 50–75 percent of the supervising lawyer's hourly rate. For example, a paralegal working with a supervising lawyer who charges $150 per hour would normally charge the client between $75 and $110 per hour, depending on the experience of the paralegal.
As word of this discovery got out, large corporations and insurance companies required their lawyers to cut legal costs by using paralegals. Lawyers soon realized that the proper use of paralegals made the practice of law more efficient and less expensive. The use of paralegals has now expanded to nearly every area of the law.
Job Satisfaction
Another reason the paralegal field is so popular is that it offers a high degree of job satisfaction. People who enter the paralegal field are often highly motivated and seek positions that offer a professional challenge. While paralegals work under the supervision of lawyers, they often have a significant amount of independence in performing their assigned tasks. Because paralegals offer a more cost-effective means of gathering information, most paralegals spend a significant portion of their time dealing with clients, the legal representatives of other parties, court personnel, and other persons. As a part of a team providing legal services, a paralegal is often directly involved in identifying and solving the client's legal issues.
Variety of Work
Paralegals often comment on the variety of work activities offered in the paralegal field. Each legal problem presents its own set of facts and legal issues. Even paralegals who specialize in a specific area of the law perform a wide variety of tasks on specific client matters. This variety makes the paralegal field interesting and challenging.
Defining a Paralegal
A paralegal's responsibilities include tasks that would otherwise be performed by a lawyer. There is no universally accepted definition of a paralegal. Some employers create a job description based on the specific educational qualifications and levels of work experience they seek. But there are no formal requirements. Other definitions attempt to provide a comprehensive list of paralegal duties. Still other definitions describe specific skills and competencies required of paralegals.
None of these definitions is completely satisfactory because lawyers and clients use paralegals in many different ways. There is no “one size fits all” definition of a paralegal. In fact, the bar associations in many states have their own definitions, some preferring the term legal assistant.
Fact
Paralegals are sometimes called “legal assistants.” The dispute over what to call these legal professionals has divided three of the most influential organizations in the paralegal profession. The National Association of Legal Assistants (NALA) prefers the term legal assistant. The National Federation of Paralegal Associations (NFPA) uses the term paralegal, while the American Bar Association (ABA) considers the terms interchangeable.
Even with all these variations, the several definitions of paralegal share some important features:
A paralegal does not practice law, although some administrative agencies allow paralegals to appear before them without a lawyer.
A paralegal has specific legal knowledge acquired through education, training, or work experience.
A paralegal uses this legal knowledge to perform substantive legal tasks under the supervision of a lawyer.
What Does a Paralegal Do?
In theory, there is no standard for what a paralegal does. In practice, the ways a paralegal can assist a lawyer in delivering affordable, quality legal services are limited only by the imagination of the lawyer.
Many factors affect the nature of the assignments a paralegal receives, including the experience and education of the paralegal, the complexity of the legal task, and the specific practice setting. In most cases, however, a paralegal performs some or all of the following tasks:
Client contact. Most paralegals assist lawyers by serving as the first line of communication with the client. By designating the paralegal as the primary contact, the lawyer is free to perform other functions. Unless the client has a question or problem that requires legal advice, paralegals are quite effective in keeping the client up to date on the progress of his case.
Client interviews. To provide good legal service, a lawyer needs to know the facts of the client's legal problem. The task of obtaining factual information from the client is often delegated to paralegals. Most paralegals have specific skills in client interviewing and fact identification.
Legal investigations. Paralegals are often assigned the task of gathering, organizing, and summarizing relevant information. A probate matter might require an investigation into the value of a certain piece of personal property; a personal injury lawsuit might be based on photographs of the accident scene taken by the investigating police officer. An experienced paralegal knows where to find relevant information and how to evaluate it.
Docket control. Nearly every legal task has a deadline. A document must be filed with the court, a contract must be signed, or a response to a request for information is due. In many offices, the paralegal is responsible for tracking deadlines and other important dates for the lawyer.
Legal research. If properly trained, paralegals can often perform routine legal research for the lawyer. Routine legal research tasks include locating the applicable cases, statutes, court rules, and regulations on a specific legal issue. A paralegal might also be asked to analyze and summarize the impact of this research on the client's case.
Legal drafting. A paralegal is able to prepare legal documents under the supervision of a lawyer. Paralegals often prepare drafts of pleadings, contracts, deeds, or wills for review by the lawyer, as well as routine legal correspondence and interoffice memoranda.
This list is not exhaustive. The precise duties of a paralegal depend on the needs of the lawyer and the client. Some paralegals accompany their lawyers to court or to witness depositions, especially if document management is a concern. Other paralegals perform secretarial functions such as typing, filing, and photocopying.
Traits of a Successful Paralegal
Successful paralegals have entered the profession by many different paths. Some are former legal secretaries who became paralegals as their knowledge and experience proved more and more valuable to the clients. Some were employed in some other aspect of the legal system, such as an insurance adjuster or union representative. Still others obtained formal paralegal degrees before entering the profession. (Chapter 2 explores the range of preparatory programs available today.)
There is, at this time, no licensing requirement for paralegals, and paralegals do not have to pass an examination to practice as lawyers do. And since it is not necessary that a paralegal have a specific level of education or work experience, a single firm might employ a paralegal staff coming from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Even so, those paralegals have several personal attributes in common. They all have a high degree of professionalism, they all have an understanding of the importance of confidentiality in the legal profession, and they all have a significant measure of self-confidence. These qualities are essential in any successful paralegal.
Professionalism
A paralegal must exhibit professionalism. Professionalism is not simply a matter of how you behave in front of others or how you dress. These are important, but not as important as how you think. A professional paralegal does not allow emotion or personal biases to affect the service to the client. A professional paralegal is able to set aside outside influences, from worry about a child's illness to a personal dislike of the client, and focus on doing the best job possible on the assigned legal task.
Paralegals must be able to deal with clients in many difficult situations. Some clients are at a crisis point in their lives — dealing with divorce or death of a loved one. These clients must be treated with tact and empathy. Other clients may be extremely demanding or undergoing periods of stress. A successful paralegal is able to deal with these situations in a way that strengthens the client relationship.
A paralegal will not always agree with the positions taken by a client. However, such feelings cannot be allowed to influence the paralegal's approach to assigned tasks. This attribute is so important that there is an ethical rule requiring paralegals to advise their employers if personal feelings might interfere with the quality of service to the client.
Maintaining Confidentiality
A paralegal must understand the importance of confidentiality in the legal setting. Most of us have heard of attorney-client confidentiality.
This describes the obligation of a lawyer to never reveal to a third person any information received from a client without the client's permission. Paralegals must observe the same ethical obligation. The duty to protect the confidentiality of client communications is a proactive one.
A successful paralegal is vigilant in ensuring client confidentiality. Keeping client information confidential requires constant watchfulness. Mislaid papers, overheard telephone conversations, or simple gossip are common breaches of confidentiality. The paralegal must guard against breaches of confidentiality in every situation.
Self-confidence
To be successful, a paralegal must be able to work independently, often with little or no direction. The supervising lawyer will not always be available to answer questions or provide direction.
Self-confidence takes another form as well. Paralegals must deal with other people — clients, other legal representatives, court personnel, and witnesses, to name a few. These persons often expect the paralegal to be knowledgeable about a given subject. A successful paralegal must feel and be able to convey the assurance of competence in order to be effective in these encounters. Self-confidence that you understand the topic is a necessary attribute.
Skills of a Successful Paralegal
Success in the paralegal field is not based solely on legal knowledge.
To become an integral part of the legal services team, a paralegal must have certain skills and abilities, in addition to a command of procedural rules and substantive legal principles. These skills are the defining characteristics of the most successful paralegal practitioners.
A successful paralegal is able to apply specific legal knowledge gained through education and experience to assist in solving the client's legal problem. Paralegals operate as part of a team that delivers legal services to the client. This focus on the client's success requires a paralegal to perform quality work in a timely fashion with appropriate attention to detail.
