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!

Method to My Madness: Getting More Done

Running my own business requires a different mindset about time management than that which served me as a law firm employee. I have many more tasks requiring my attention, and a different set of priorities. This has necessitated a "re-think" about the organization of my time.

As a paralegal in a law firm, my to-do list flowed from my case deadlines, and assignments from attorneys. After all, most case deadlines are pretty non-negotiable! That motion must get filed by this time on this date, and I must move heaven and earth to make that happen. And when a partner calls wanting something done, the only appropriate response is, “On it!”

Now as a virtual and freelance paralegal, I still have deadlines for case work assigned by my attorney clients. But on top of that, I also have a host of business related tasks I must perform. No matter how much client work I have in the pipeline (and I want to have a lot!), I ignore these other tasks at my peril, because my flow of future client work depends on them.

When I first started this business, I naturally used my old method of a long, daily list of to-dos, largely driven by external deadlines. But when I began adding those business and marketing related projects into this list, two things happened.

First, the list got overwhelmingly long!

But second and perhaps more problematic, because the business related tasks didn’t usually have the hard deadlines that the client projects did, they got shoved to the side. Or they led to a lot of disorganized and confusing “project jumping.” My sense of the priority of these business tasks was so subjective and fear driven, that I found myself switching from one thing to another to the point that little got done.

I needed a better way.

I've posted before about my realization that I need a strategy for prioritizing my to-dos. As my thinking has evolved – or perhaps as my frustration level has become unbearable – I’ve also realized I need a structure. Something to keep the daily list below 25 items. Or even if I'm using the post-it method (which is that your daily list has to fit on a post-it - see here), I need something to prevent those items that never make it onto the post-it from completely falling through the cracks.

So now I’m trying the “days of the week” method. In other words, categories of projects are assigned to different days of the week.

Now, some tasks need to be done every day. Like client work – I do whatever it takes to get it done, get it done well, and get it done on time. Also exercise – I really try to do this every day. Also Twitter, reading and commenting on blogs, and other social media activities – I spend time on them most days, although not the same amount of time each day. (Why waste time on this? See here and here.)

Another item I can’t assign a day to is in-person networking events. I see big benefits from these for my business, so I attend them whenever they occur and schedule everything else around them.

But the bigger biz-related projects? I’ve assigned them days. For example, I reserve the same day each week for working on my Newsletter. (Not a subscriber? See the sidebar!) I reserve a different day each week for article writing. And yet another day for my website. Etc.

What’s helpful about this is it thwarts my temptation to switch projects every time I get an idea. Say I get an incredibly great idea about organizing an article I’m writing. Typically I would start worrying about the article, and maybe I would even stop what I’m doing to work on it. But this way, I jot the idea down, tell myself I’ll flesh it out on my article writing day, and then continue what I was doing. Or suppose I get a sudden surge of panic that my newsletter isn't ready and it has to go out next week - OMG! I tell myself to relax, that I’ll finish it on my upcoming newsletter day. And I go on with what I’m doing.

Another benefit is that I can actually assure I will get to my accounting, and other administrative stuff! After all, I’ve reserved Mondays for that! It makes it much harder to come up with a convenient excuse to avoid working on that stuff I don't enjoy but need to to!

This method is working for me at the moment, and I find I’m managing to move more projects forward. How about you – what do you do about managing your to-do list?

Virtual Paralegals in Litigation Part 5: Delegating Appropriate Tasks

A virtual paralegal can offer huge benefits to a litigation practice, providing savings in both time and money. The purpose of this series has been to discuss those benefits, and answer some of the questions litigators have about working with a virtual or remote working paralegal.

In recent posts I discussed a way to think about the title "virtual paralegal," the readily available technologies virtual paralegals use, issues related to document security and confidentiality, and developing trust in a virtual paralegal.

Today we discuss a final area to consider when contemplating working with a virtual paralegal:

Delegating Suitable Tasks. Some lawyers believe that all the work they require simply has to be done on-site. Or said differently, they believe they need the immediacy of a paralegal close at hand for urgent projects.

Let us concede that there are a small number of tasks which cannot readily be performed from a remote location: making copies, for example, or meeting with clients, experts or witnesses.

However there are a host of tasks that are perfectly suited for a remote working paralegal. These include drafting correspondence, discovery, discovery responses and simple pleadings. They include performing suitable legal or procedural research. They include reviewing documents, preparing document productions, and summarizing depositions. They include cite checking briefs, downloading case law, and e-filing documents.

For example in my own business, I have performed on line and law library research on procedural issues and drafted memos outlining my findings for attorney clients. I have uploaded all relevant statutes and case law to an on-line shared document folder for my clients' review. I have drafted and served notices to all parties in my clients’ cases. I have reviewed and organized client documents, both in paper  and electronic formats. I have bates numbered documents for production. I have reviewed document productions to compile data needed for motions. I have drafted declarations and assembled their exhibits.

These are just a few examples of the many services a virtual paralegal is able to provide to litigation attorney clients, working remotely from his or her own well-equipped office.

A competent virtual paralegal can help an attorney evaluate which projects are best suited for his or her assistance, and can help break the project down into tasks which the attorney can delegate to both in-house and remote working staff. A virtual paralegal can help streamline the case load of any litigation practice. Litigators can not only reap the benefits of a contractor working only when needed, but can also save the costs of providing space, equipment and supplies.

It’s a win/win for us all!

Some of the Things I Need to Know I Didn’t Learn in Kindergarten

Whatever our chosen profession, we’re always learning.  I’ve tried to learn most of my paralegal skills through formal education, observing others more experienced than myself, being mentored, etc.  However, I’ve got to admit that some of my greatest lessons I learned from my mistakes!
 
Early in my career, I was a paralegal in some small law firms, where I was mentored by some very skilled attorneys, and had the chance to do some fairly substantive work.  But as I say, I was inexperienced, and mistakes were made.  By me, that is.  Now I look back on that time fondly because it was formative and my mistakes made me a much better paralegal.
 
One of my attorneys frequently tasked me with writing letters and drafting discovery requests for her, and she was irritated when I gave her drafts containing typographical errors.  It only took a few occasions of being thus taken to task before I learned to proofread everything I wrote.  Again.  And again.  And even backwards.  And I’m grateful to her, because there is really no excuse for giving a supervisor a draft containing typos.  Why shouldn’t my work be as flawless as it can be?  Why should I ever strive for anything less? 
 
There was a day when one of my attorneys phoned me from a deposition quite concerned because he had no court reporter, and it turned out this was because I had failed to schedule one.  Yikes!  I immediately phoned our favorite court reporter who, in a great stroke of luck, happened to be available.  She got to the deposition in record time and saved the day, while I learned a big lesson about keeping deposition checklists to assure everything was scheduled in advance and every detail was in order.

I worked with another attorney whose biggest peeve was people making excuses.  He could forgive any mistake (my failure to reschedule an expert's trial testimony comes to mind!) if one would only own up to it.  So when something went wrong, I learned to make a beeline to his office to talk it over with him, ready with a proposal for fixing it and ready to take my lumps and do whatever had to be done.  He may have been disappointed at the error, but he respected my frankness, and this habit of taking responsibility for my mistakes has served me well ever since.
 
There was another occasion early in my career when I was put in charge of a large filing with a lot of evidence, much of which had to be filed under seal.  I delegated the project of preparing declaration exhibits to a junior clerk.  This was the right thing to do, because she was bright and hardworking, and I couldn’t get everything done myself.  But my mistake was in blithely handling my part of the filing without adequately supervising her portion of the project.  When I checked in on her and her crew mid-afternoon and found they were far behind schedule, I realized we were in danger of missing the filing deadline.  PANIC! 

I rushed to my supervising attorney, described the problem, and we devised a Plan B and made our deadline, but I’ve never forgotten this lesson.  It is a good idea to delegate tasks, but I cannot delegate supervision.  I need to see the big picture, stay on top of all the moving parts, check in on my team, make sure everything is on schedule and if it’s not, readjust immediately.  Often this means doing less of the work myself, in order to supervise the work others are doing more effectively.  The experience made me a much better manager of staff and projects, which is an important skill for a paralegal to have.
 
Got your own stories of lessons learned?  Feel free to share them in the comments!

Apologies to lovers of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, with a note to say many things I did learn in kindergarten still serve me quite well too.