Downsizing

I have downsized.

Oh, I don’t mean my paycheck, although for the time being while I’m getting my business going, that’s true too. (Just you wait . . . I’ll be back making the medium bucks again any time now!)

No, I mean I’ve downsized in terms of the size of the offices I work with, and the size of the cases I work on. It’s still a novelty!

In BigLaw in recent years, I tended to work on mega-cases. There were armies of attorneys to respond to, scads of money at stake, and boatloads of documents to manage, and filings and deadlines to track. There were always ten plates spinning at once.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have ten plates spinning at once now – often I do. But they’re my plates, not the plates spun off by the decisions of others, which I must nonetheless keep in the air somehow.

No, the offices I work with now as a virtual paralegal tend to be small. I work with solo practitioners, for the most part. They may or may not have on-site staff, and they may or may not have permanent office space.

Because my clients have smaller offices themselves, they tend to handle matters that are somewhat less document intensive than those I've handled in the past. They tend to use different technology than that which I had become accustomed to in recent years. I work more with PDF document compilations, and less with Concordance databases, for example. I prepare document productions in the hundreds (or maybe low thousands) of pages, rather than in the tens of thousands.

But these are minor differences - differences of detail rather than substance.

In fact, now more than ever I am often called upon to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish a project with available resources and my own two hands and the small-office technology at my disposal, with no Litigation Support personnel to fall back on for getting a project done. This satisfies my practical nature.

Case size and technology may have downsized, but professionalism certainly has not. With my attorney clients, the quality of the work is just as painstaking, and the expectations of excellence are just as high as they were when I worked at larger firms. This satisfies my perfectionist nature.

There is a different “office” dynamic as well. (Yes, in an odd way my attorney clients and I do make up an "office.") There are fewer layers of approval to work one’s way through than in large offices. I find that communication is more direct, and the sense of partnership I feel with my clients is more pronounced. This satisfies my collaborative nature.

So you see, in my world, downsizing has been a very good thing!

Vacation Season's Here At Last!

Oh wait . . are you kidding?!? Not for me! I’m teaching all summer long – our program doesn’t take a summer break! So me, I’ll likely be plugging along at my own office desk through the variably hot, mild or overcast summer weather of beautiful Sonoma County where I live.

Vacation Snorkeling!

But for much of the working western world, it’s that time when employees begin pondering escape from the proverbial rat race for their much anticipated vacations.

Although I’ve always been more of a spring/fall traveler, myself.

An interesting article got tweeted recently which stimulated this train of thought: Should you contact that vacationing employee? The article gives what seems to me to be quite prudent advice to an employer about how to decide when it’s appropriate to interrupt an employee on vacation.

During my many years of law firm employment, I’ve run the gamut on this one. I have indeed been phoned while on vacation. I’ve been phoned at 10 pm. I’ve been called into the office on a Saturday afternoon to fix something that went awry. I didn’t really begrudge these interruptions to my non-work life – in most cases, they were legitimate emergencies.

That said, I have a confession to make. Historically, I have been a bit rebellious on this topic!

Don’t get me wrong. I do not endorse rebellion in law firms. It is generally a poor strategy for maintaining gainful employment. But truth be told, I have not always been docile and compliant when it came to making myself available during non-work hours, including but not limited to vacations.

There was a particular small law firm in my past, with a particular beloved attorney (No, really! I was fond of her! Honest!) who was notorious for . . . how shall we put this . . . neglecting certain boundaries. For example, she was prone to sitting at her desk and hollering my name when she needed something, causing me to stop what I was doing, get up from my desk, and walk into her office to say, “What?” Rather like my mother used to do, and evoking a startlingly similar emotional response.

Now granted, she probably thought it was silly to pick up the phone and call me when I was right next door. And maybe that’s true. I dunno . . you pick your poison.

She was also prone to phoning me (if I wasn't within hollering distance, that is) in “dire emergencies.” Such as not being able to find a piece of paper she suddenly needed.

Which was on her desk.

Which she was standing next to.

Knowing this, I once intentionally failed to leave my contact information when I went on a week-long vacation. (Note: This was before everyone and her brother had a cell phone.) I knew that while she may have had difficulty finding a document on her desk, she would have had no difficulty tracking down my phone number while I was travelling, if it was anywhere in the office. And I knew she would call me when she couldn’t find that piece of paper. Which was on her desk. Which she was standing next to.

And in fact, I learned upon my return that she had indeed asked others in the office for my contact number on that vacation when she couldn’t find something. But they didn’t have my contact information either. Woops! (It was a nice vacation :)

There was another law firm (this time in BigLaw) where, at a certain point due to a massive case I was managing, I was offered a firm Crackberry Blackberry.

And I refused. (GASP!) 

Because I knew what would happen. I knew that notwithstanding all assurances that I truly wouldn’t be expected to be on call 24/7, in reality I would receive countless evening/middle of the night emails, to which I would be expected to reply. Those same attorneys who refrained from phoning me at 10 pm (thanks for that, guys!) would still have emailed me at all hours of the night, and would have stared hopefully, expectantly, at their own Crackberrys, anticipating my inevitable response.

And if I failed to respond, you can bet I would have heard about it.

So I politely declined, and they didn't force me to carry one. (Thanks for that too, guys!) And lo and behold, the world kept turning, and the case was (ultimately) successful anyway.

It may seem by this that I’m advocating a refusal on the part of staff to make themselves available to their attorneys in off-hours times of need, and I’m really not. There are times when things go wrong after hours, or even, heaven forefend, in the middle of a vacation, and the team player is willing to help out.

No, I’m simply advocating establishing some reasonable boundaries to our personal lives, and assisting our bosses in respecting them.

After all, we all need a little vacation now and then!

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!

Driven: Part 2, Or, The Bugs Bunny Secret to Workplace Bliss

Onward with my musings about Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. What with the little explosions that keep going off in my head, it feels like the 4th of July around here!

One of the big premises of Pink’s book is that lots of biz owners believe something about employees that research shows is flat wrong. And based on that flawed belief, biz owners use means of motivating employees that don't work very well any more.

This flawed assumption is that people need rewards and punishments – carrots and sticks – in order to do anything.

That absent carrots and sticks, workers would be content to . . . well . . . not work.

That employees will do the bare minimum required to pick up their paychecks and go home.

As a result, many businesses manage their employees with a set of carrots (bonuses, salary increases etc.) and sticks (no bonuses, bad reviews, possibly loss of job).

Pink cites a lot of interesting research that shows why this is a bad assumption – that we are not lazy, passive slouches by nature, but instead, normally curious, interested and self-directed. Granted, some folks have had these cool traits drummed out of them. But for the most part, humans can be motivated to do good work by things other than carrots and sticks.

The tricky thing is, research shows that rewards and punishments can actually have really nasty side effects. Things like dampened motivation. Reduced creativity. Myopic thinking. Even cheating. (See p. 35).

There is a lot to all of this of course, and you've gotta check it out yourself for more details, but here’s the juice for today.

Even before I got to the inevitable section in the book where Pink talks about law firms to exemplify his theory (at 98-101), my brain was twirling with ways in which BigLaw uses . . . you guessed it . . . carrots and sticks to motivate both lawyers and staff.

Here's the caveat. In my experience, big law firms do not necessarily view their employees as hapless lazy folk who need a firm hand to get things done. My experience has been quite contrary to that – there has been an expectation that employees desire to do good work, and that everyone will do their best and get the job done right.

BUT talk about carrots and sticks! Can you spell minimum billable hours?

Quality is assumed - taken for granted even - and if your work isn't up to par, you may be shown the door, but quantity is the real name of the game.

In many offices, the minimum is impossible to meet without some serious overtime, even for paralegals, and heaven help you if you’re an associate and want to have a life. In many cases, timekeepers not meeting their minimum requirement are not getting a bonus Period. End. Of. Story. No matter how exemplary their work may be in every other respect. The carrot is more money, and the stick is less money (and no partner track) at best. At worst, it’s unemployment.

Such an environment could cause a paralegal to care more about racking up hours than about doing great work for the client. It could cause a paralegal to take less pride in the excellence of her work product, because the only thing that puts money in the bank is billables. It could even motivate someone to (gasp!) pad her hours.

And yet, wonder of wonders, that's not what I experienced! My colleagues and I wanted to do good work. We wanted to serve the client. We wanted to do our best to help win the case. We also wanted to be ethical and honest.

Now don’t get me wrong. My purpose here is not to trash BigLaw – my years in BigLaw served me well, and I'm not picking any bones with my past employers.

Nor is it to trash the billable hour – lots of other people are doing that these days and I’ll leave it to them.

My purpose is to tip my hat to my colleagues in BigLaw who do good work, and care about excellence, despite the fact that the environment in which they work could stifle those traits.

Oh yeah . . . Where in the heck does Bugs Bunny fit into all this?

Well, think about it.

Bugs Bunny never works for carrots. In fact, Bugs Bunny doesn't work at all. Because what Bugs does he would never classify as work. (About which, more in the next post in this series!)

Bugs just does what he's best at!

Which happens to be stealing carrots, eating carrots, and annoying the heck out of Elmer Fudd . . , well, I guess that is another story after all, isn't it?

Always Be Teaching

Lee Rosen, in his insightful blog Divorce Discourse, had a couple of great posts a while back (here and here) about the importance of cultivating a culture in a law office in which everyone teaches others how to do what they do, and everyone learns what others are doing. Every employee, from partner down to receptionist, should be both teacher and student. This appeals to me on many levels:

First, because it means that everyone understands the value of another’s job, which fosters mutual respect.

Second, because we hone and finetune our own knowledge and expertise as we think about how to share it with others.

Third, because this culture of teaching helps instill shared values about excellent service to clients, teamwork and courtesy.

And finally, it appeals to me because it means that no one is indispensable or irreplaceable, and that is a good thing. When some young staff member goes off to law school, someone else knows the status of her projects and can keep them moving. Perhaps anyone in the office is equipped to help a new client with an info packet, and filling out paperwork. And everyone knows how to make a photocopy in a pinch.

When I worked in BigLaw, I loved to mentor junior staff. I wanted to teach them what I knew about procedure; I wanted to impart knowledge about how to manage a case. I wanted to share best practices on how to approach projects. And I frequently found myself learning from them how to do something more efficiently! This happened in particular when younger, tech savvy staff quickly grasped and then taught me how to streamline a database search, or had new ideas about organization.

And I appreciated the time many lawyers took to mentor me about their philosophy of a case or a motion or a discovery task, and showed me exactly how they wanted something done.

Now as a virtual and freelance paralegal, I am constantly learning from clients their preferred procedures, and their understanding of and goals for their cases. And I sometimes find myself in a position of teaching them about a new technology too.

And while opportunities to share my knowledge with fellow legal support staff don't crop up every day as they did when I worked in a law office, I still relish the chance to teach and to learn from others. Active participation in my local paralegal association is one way to do this. Networking with fellow virtual paralegals and California LDAs is another. Also, I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy preparing my newsletter so much. (Sign up at the right!) I love being the curator of a resource which I hope provides useful tips and resources to colleagues. And getting emails from readers sharing their own tips and resources is an even greater kick.

Wherever we work and whatever our roll, this is an inspiring message: always be learning, but also, always be teaching.

Who you gonna call?

When I worked in BigLaw, there were plenty of opportunities to exchange ideas and commiserate with co-workers. The office was veritably pulsing with fellow paralegals, IT folks, litigation support people, legal secretaries and document clerks who were all involved somehow in the endeavor of providing excellent service to firm clients. Everyone had a role to play in getting the firm’s work done, and everyone in his or her own way was dedicated to accomplishing that.

I had people everywhere I could seek help from, brainstorm with, complain to (not that I would ever do that!), and get encouragement from. And co-workers would come to me for the same reasons. There was (usually) a spirit of teamwork and cooperation.

Or at the very least, a coffee run co-conspirator or after work drinking buddy.

Ah, but I work in BigLaw no longer! I am flying solo . . . master (mistress??) of my own fate . . . a solitary soul slaving in solitude, so to speak!

If you’re a biz owner, a “solopreneur” as the current buzzword goes, where do you go to get ideas?

Who do you turn to when you need to ask a question, or to get advice, or to vent, or to enjoy a simple cuppa coffee forgodssake?

Who you gonna call?????

Well it turns out, much to my delight, there actually are folks!

First, there are colleagues in my paralegal association. As I go to meetings – whether it's the entire membership, the litigation section, or the occasional board meeting, I've begun to form friendships. Most of these colleagues work in law firms; some work as freelance paralegals as I do; a few are unemployed and looking for work. I can empathize with all these situations, and we support each other.

Next there are colleagues, both paralegals and attorneys, whom I’ve begun to make friends with through my involvement in other associations, such as the county bar association and my Women in Law group. We can swap stories, swap tips about legal vendors, or occasionally even reminisce about our former life in BigLaw!

I have developed a network of local fellow biz owners who are great friends, and who also brainstorm with me about building my business. (Turns out they’re superb drinking buddies too!)

But what I didn't anticipate when I began my virtual paralegal business was how many friends I’d meet online through Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs!

• There is a small group of fellow virtual paralegals I've phone-conferenced with, and who are proving to be a supportive group to exchange ideas with.
• There is a group of fellow freelancers, in a wide variety of fields, that I have weekly chats with about marketing and other business matters.
• There are interesting and talented legal professionals who share or post material that I find useful and that I learn from.
• There is a virtual assistant and tech guru extraordinaire I met on Twitter, who is now helping me revamp my website. (Thanks @TMarieHilton!)

What I’ve learned is that participating in professional organizations, building friendships with fellow biz owners, and being active on social media sites are even more important for me as a self-employed virtual paralegal than they were when I was an employee. Now that I can’t just walk down the hallway to find a co-worker to consult with, it has become doubly important to make sure I’m active in my paralegal & bar associations, and that I'm showing up online to exchange information and good will with folks.

Plus, I've gotta get my coffee run co-conspirators and drinking buddies from somewhere!

What about you? Who are you gonna call?

Stuff I Miss About BigLaw . . . and Stuff I Don't! (Plus, a Bonus)

No really! Quit laughing! There are things I miss about my life in BigLaw! Such as:

1.  I miss having all my MCLEs and training programs paid for by someone else.
2.  I miss having a team of staff to manage.
3.  I miss the opportunities to teach training programs.
4.  I miss the afternoon latte breaks. Note: there is no Peet's Coffee in walking distance of my home office :(
5.  I miss specific people. Attorneys I liked working with. Fellow staffers who were helpful, knowledgeable and a kick in the ass.
6.  I miss the Word Processing Department! (But now I’m oh-so-skilled at formatting those documents myself!)

Stuff I'm not missing even a little about my former life in BigLaw:

1.  I don't miss getting yelled at by attorneys. (Not that that ever happened . . . )

2.  I don’t miss the all-nighters. Thank god my current boss doesn't allow those. :P
3.  I don’t miss the commute. Not. One. Bit.
4.  I don’t miss the billable hour minimum.
5.  I don’t miss the terrible vending machine food in the lunch room.
6.  I don’t miss being stuck with the terrible vending machine food when I’m too busy to find something better to eat.

And as an added bonus, things I love about being a virtual paralegal:

1.  I love the variety of projects I work on – an even greater variety of work than I experienced in any one law firm.
2.  I love learning about the varied cases of my clients in different practice areas.
3.  I love not commuting! (See #3 above.)
4.  I love the flexibility to exercise and run errands in the middle of the day if I want to.
5.  I love the tremendous sense of ownership I have over every aspect of my work, now that I’m a business owner.
6.  I love the technology I utilize to work remotely.
7.  I love the ability to say NO, when no is the best thing for me or for my business.

8.  I love some of the things marketing a business compels me to do. Such as professional networking events, writing my newsletter, Twitter and blog reading as industry research.
9.  See how long this list is?

Things I love not so much about being a virtual paralegal:

1.  I don’t love the inconsistent cash flow.
2.  I don’t love all the annoying administrative details - business taxes, licenses, accounting.
3.  I don’t love some of the things marketing a business compels me to do. Such as cold – or even warm – calling, marketing ROI analysis, tooting my own horn.
4.  See how short this list is?

What do you love/love not so much about your work?