|
Hopefully this hasn't been done to death on the lawyer/law school threadnaught but ain't nobody got time to dig through that beast. I'm a 30 year old white male, been working in the same paraprofessional, unionized academic library gig for the past 7 years (albeit with various demonstrable increases in responsibility and initiative, zzzzzz). I've got my BA from a prestigious liberal arts college and my Masters degree in Library Science, but have been contemplating making moves into some other career for a while now. Recently, my union came out with a free tuition benefit towards picking up an associates' degree from an online community college, which sounds as good an opportunity as any to acquire some extra certifications or skills, and add another line to the resume. That whole thing is explained here. One of the associates degrees on offer is a Paralegal program. The field has always been interesting to me, since the lawyer-ing bit of being a lawyer doesn't have too much appeal, but I do enjoy the research portion of library work and writing-intensive projects. It also seems like it may be a more universal skill set than librarydom, or that at least between the two I can be more employable than I am now, since I anticipate moving on from my current position in the next 2 years or so. My main questions: - What do you like or hate about working as a paralegal? - What are prospects for the field looking like in the foreseeable future? Apparently the Department of Labor anticipates an upswing in demand for legal professionals but uh, you wouldn't know it based on the law school thread. And I seem to recall hearing that the field might be hot territory for automation in the near future. - Is it even worth spending time on getting this weenie associates' degree from this nowhere community college? Will an associates' degree draw any interest at all, especially in conjunction with my existing masters degree? - Any resources outside of goon wisdom that you'd recommend for future research? Thanks!
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2017 16:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 10:15 |
|
|
I worked as a paralegal for five years so maybe I can offer some insight. I hold a B.A. in History (after bailing on an education degree) and was getting nowhere with it so I did a 2 year certificate program for paralegal. I graduated with a 3.8 from the program and an internship with a local attorney under my belt. This got me hired into a debt collection practice at 11/hr where I stayed 4.5 years, ending up making 16/hr when I got hired by another firm to do family law, evictions, and some minor collections work. That job paid 19/hr but my attorney was a workaholic who needed everything done perfectly at the last second, which I could not handle as a novice in family law, and got let go after 4 months. Following that, I got hired by a nonprofit doing clerical work for only slightly less than what I was making before, and I haven't looked back. Your options for entry level paralegal work are not going to be great. There are jobs out there, but most of the entry level work will bore you to death or kill your soul. And until you're highly skilled and somewhat specialized in a specific area of law, your pay is also likely to not be very good either. I got into it for the same reasons you describe - I always loved research and you will do legal research in school (probably two sections, even). But unless you're a judge's clerk or your attorney is absolutely brand new (in which case they can't afford you anyway), you will not be doing research on a daily basis. You will be generating boilerplate pleadings and changing a few lines here and there to reflect the specifics of the case. Yes, mass-merging entire pleadings is a thing firms do if they have any volume, and it breeds a lot of carelessness because frankly it is the most boring paperwork you can imagine. You will not be exercising much independent thought at all if you end up doing this. Mistakes can be extremely costly and depending on your firm can easily get you fired. When I did debt collection one of my coworkers lost a chain of title on a case that happened to get countersued and the firm ended up with a $60,000 punitive damages judgment against it. That paralegal no longer works there. Let's say on the other hand you end up getting hired to a small firm with only one, or a few, attorneys. Here, your employability will rest on your billables, meaning you have to produce enough work (and keep track of it down to the 1/x of every hour) to keep your job. You will basically need enough expertise to work efficiently enough to produce a pleading within a reasonable amount of time, all the time, as much as is possible every day. Too much or too little time spent on each pleading costs the firm its margin and if you are not profitable enough you are fired. Getting billables down is an art and expectations will vary at every firm. Who you work for makes a huge difference in workplace culture. The collections agency was wannabe corporate, down to excessively conservative rules of conduct, ridiculous micromanagement for work that could almost run on autopilot, and a ton of nepotism. The small firm culture was extremely laid back and while not really liberal per se, no one cared if you shouted gently caress YOU at a coworker (or attorney) across the building (when no clients were present). Make sure wherever you apply, that you really like your attorney/firm in the interview or you will have a miserable experience. PROS: * Attorneys can be awesome people. They are all weirdos. Being an attorney means your brain is wired differently and there is a lot you don't give a gently caress about. * You eventually end up knowing a lot about a specific area of the law. * You can get your employer to pay for your notary public (I have not used this outside of my tenure as a paralegal) * You sometimes get very intimate glimpses into the private lives of other people, if that's something that appeals to you * The pay is okay, might even be pretty good depending on where you live and what kind of legal work you're doing * You will meet a lot of interesting people in the legal orbit * If you are considering law school at all, in any seriousness, do paralegal work first. Many of my coworkers went on to law school, but for the love of god test the field before you commit to law school. Law school megathread is on point. * Associates is good enough to get you in the door but maybe not an entirely online CC. Do they have ABA accreditation? CONS: * Attorneys can be total assholes and they are all weirdos. * You will likely end up kinda pigeon holed into an area of law and it is hard to diversify. * Until you are very good at what you do, you have less job security than you do at a lot of other clerical type jobs. * You will end up doing a lot of work you don't want to do. It will hurt your soul if you have any natural empathy. You don't get to pick sides in the case. * Entry level work pays poo poo wages and you will probably not enjoy it. * There is a lot more blowback for loving up as a paralegal. Simple mistakes can have huge consequences. There is a lot of performance pressure. * The entire field is pretentious as gently caress. Good for some personality types, unbearable for others. * The effort/reward ratio is not as good as other clerical jobs with less responsibility SUMMARY: If you are considering law school, definitely try legal work. Not necessarily paralegal - you can get hired for mailroom, reception, secretarial, etc without an AA or cert at a lot of places. If you just want to do legal research... you are 99% not going to do that until many years into your paralegal career if ever. If you are really interested in a specific topic, buy or borrow a Lexis account and go to town with it. I would not give up a cake unionized gig for paralegal in a million years tbqh. Hope that all helps! I'm not bitter about my experiences in the field - they got me where I am today - but it was an extremely long and stressful five years for altogether pretty meager rewards.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2017 03:10
|
|
|
You will largely never get to do research because research is the 'fun' bit. That and talking poo poo in teleconferences. I am a paralegal and this month all I will be doing all day, every day is looking at phone bills and making bundles... for the phone bills. It is nice because I get to sit in a comfy chair, in the warm and get paid OK and because I am somewhere big enough that I don't have to interact with the lawyers all that often. However, it is not something I would spend any amount of time studying to do. Also the automation thing is bullshit. They are such a long way from that, that it's laughable. I previously worked somewhere that had one of those systems and they paid me a lot of money to fix the mistakes the machine made, taking twice the time and money of just getting one real person to do it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2017 11:17
|
|
|
Automation is not bullshit. This software will let you mass-generate pleadings out of a database into a WordPerfect document. http://www.collectionsoftware.com/cmaster/ I spent years doing exactly that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2017 03:07
|
|