What's the Best Learning Environment for a Paralegal?

Question: What’s the best learning work environment for a litigation paralegal?

Answer: Any work environment can be an excellent learning experience – a paralegal just might learn different things in different settings.

Tiny firm. In my experience, this is the place that affords a paralegal the chance to perform the most substantive tasks. This happens because there are fewer hands to do the work, but that rarely translates into less work to do. So a paralegal might get a lot of experience drafting all manner of documents, interacting  with clients, and becoming a veritable jack-of-all-trades.

I cut my teeth in a pretty small law firm with 4 attorneys and about 8 staff. I drafted and answered discovery. I collected and reviewed documents. I created a calendaring system. I helped prepare for trial. Heck, I even assembled my own office furniture! It was a great opportunity to gain experience in every aspect of litigation.

Even the furniture assembly experience was not wasted!

Medium Firm. In medium firm settings, there may be fewer document drafting or client hand-holding opportunities, but there are greater resources and there are more hands to help.

I spent some years in a mid-sized firm of (if memory serves) about 65 lawyers in 3 offices. It was small enough to know everyone and to have a lot of firm-wide parties, but large enough to have more resources, such as an excellent library and librarian, daily court messenger runs, and training classes. I did a bit less document drafting and had a bit less contact with clients, and there was no furniture assembly. But I still did a lot of factual investigation, and document collection and review. And of course, lots of trial prep.

BigLaw. Then came my 10 years in BigLaw. In my experience, large law firms utilize paralegals differently than small firms do. They have armies of associates, which can mean that paralegals’ tasks are less substantive. I rarely drafted discovery responses for example, and had even less contact with clients.  With a couple of notable exceptions, I did less factual investigation too.

Oh, and no furniture assembly.

On the other hand, the cases were larger, there were many more documents involved (we’re talking millions of documents in some cases), and bigger attorney and paralegal teams. This required much greater management skills. As lead paralegal on my cases, I had to be the liaison between the attorneys and staff, to assign staff projects, and to supervise maintenance of a huge file and copious amounts of evidence. And there was still a great deal of trial prep.

Trial prep seems to be a given regardless of firm size.

Freelancing. Of course, now that I’m the self-employed owner of my own Virtual/Contract Paralegal biz, my duties have changed yet again. My litigation related tasks are extremely varied – from administrative duties such as invoicing, to hands-on tasks such as trips to the law and public libraries, to legal research, to drafting research memos, motions, declarations, etc., to discovery tasks such as document productions.

I find that I have a bit less in-depth knowledge of my clients’ cases, because I’m more likely to work on isolated projects than to run cases from start to finish. I have little or no direct contact with my clients’ clients.
And then there are all the other tasks related to running my biz, such as accounting, purchasing, IT, and marketing, marketing and more marketing. Even at my smallest law office, I wasn’t doing much of those tasks.

Oh, and I’m back to assembling my own office furniture. So it seems I have come full circle at last!