The Work Thread

Ganymede

I have two college degrees, a professional certificate, my CP/CLA (Certified Paralegal/Certified Legal Assistant) and ACP (Advanced Certified Paralegal) credentials in Discovery and Trial Practice, and I make half of the average salary of someone in an entry level position in my field, probably without those last two (which are fairly important) and tend to command an even higher salary.

Where do you work? It sounds like a shitty place to work.

Don't mind me, I have more degrees than you, of course, but I always find it strangely amusing when people start talking to me about "the odds of you winning the case" while I'm staring at actuarial tables and the graduate degree I have in a statistics-based field.

But you? You are working in a shitty place, it sounds, but for the following:

And I do the lion's share of the actual casework, too. The research, the briefs, the filings. The attorneys largely just take what I wrote and go talk about it in court.

I never ask my paralegals to do any of the following:

Research my briefs;
Write my briefs; or
File my briefs.

Because, frankly, if I'm being paid to argue them, I might as well have the professional integrity to make them myself, rather than pass off someone else's work as my own. The assholes who do the above are the same that will flog their paralegals for "getting it wrong," whilst they are the ones carrying the malpractice insurance and license to practice.

Hint: It's always the lawyer's responsibility to make sure work is done right, and don't let them forget that.

Rinel

What do you use paralegals for, then? Doc review?

I am but a wee babby lawyer, but it seems effective to have a paralegal researching with you. Even when you take into account the time you spend reviewing their research, you're saving time.

Lotherio

@Derp said in The Work Thread:

they would have gotten away with it -- if it hadn't been for the fact those meddling kids literally just read that obscure little portion last week for another case

FTFY

Auspice

@Lotherio said in The Work Thread:

@Derp said in The Work Thread:

they would have gotten away with it -- if it hadn't been for the fact those meddling kids literally just read that obscure little portion last week for another case

FTFY

Scooby doo

Ganymede

@Rinel said in The Work Thread:

What do you use paralegals for, then? Doc review?

I am but a wee babby lawyer, but it seems effective to have a paralegal researching with you. Even when you take into account the time you spend reviewing their research, you're saving time.

First, I handle insurance defense cases. In such cases, the insurance company is loathe to have attorneys (who bill at a higher rate) working on discovery. Our firm uses paralegals to draft, send out, and follow-up on discovery in civil litigation. This includes preparing and sending medical, financial, and employment authorization forms to plaintiffs, and then sending those out to respective third-parties for documents. Our paralegals also scan, sort, catalog, and summarize what is obtained. This is valuable, arguably-not-legal work. Plus, when you have cases with 10K pages of documents, you can't spend days sorting through what's come through. You could, of course, but the client will squawk.

Second, I work in esoteric areas of the law, like real property. When it comes to the fine points of the economic loss rule in a construction dispute or the doctrine of lis pendens as it may apply to a legal malpractice case, the paralegals may be able to dig up the research, but the lawyer is ultimately responsible for pulling it together in a cogent argument. At a hearing or oral argument, I simply must know all of the facts of a case in order to argue as to how it applies, so I essentially must read through all of the cited cases anyway. To me, having a paralegal do that work, only for me to do it myself, is duplicative.

Finally, I think of oral argument as improv. I feel as if having a paralegal handling the research and writing is like having someone else draft my responses in an improv game. That seems silly to me.

ZekeTheG33k

I am a Regulatory Specialist for a Electronic Medical Records company. When I joined the support team there were 4 people offering software support and ad-hoc training for over 1,000 doctor's offices and their staff. I was lucky if I got a week of training before being thrown into the fires. I am glad they did it that way, but I had to scramble those first few weeks. Now I am starting my own branch of the support team, dealing with Regulatory (Government Incentive Programs) and when the person that was supposed to be doing the development to keep our software up to date, quit, we found out NOTHING was being done at all. So the 6 months I've been trying to clean up their mess, coordinate with our development team to get the stuff designed, tested, and rolled out -- not to mention train our in house support team, sales team, implementation team and Account Management team on how to do regulatory stuff. But only in theory because our system doesn't support it yet. AND We have a dead line of 12/31 to get it supported or we lose our certifications and if we wait to long our clients can't correct their mistakes to try and make the measures for incentives.

td;lr -- FML.

gryphter

@Seamus I'm in the operations branch of a similar outfit, and your story spoke to me as we too constantly struggle to get anything done by the dev and product teams. Even critical issues that cause us to post checks and claims incorrectly don't get addressed in a timely manner. I die inside every time I get the response 'dev owns that' or 'that's a JIRA task'.

ZekeTheG33k

@gryphter I hear those terms too... Are you in Georgia?

gryphter

@Seamus I'm in Maine, but we sure do have a location in Georgia. Do you work for the goddess of wisdom?

ZekeTheG33k

@gryphter LOL. No. Her competitor. The Flower of Health.

gryphter

@Seamus I feel like the bottom line is we're working at some boring, boring, boring places. Devs can go work at Google and get paid better and enjoy a culture that's built to court and keep them... so they do. We can't attract or keep devs for shit.

ZekeTheG33k

@gryphter We can attract them, we can keep them... I just believe we could do better with out the ones we have.. LOL

Derp

@Ganymede said in The Work Thread:

Where do you work? It sounds like a shitty place to work.

For the government. So, you know. Yes? But I keep running into that 'you don't have three years of experience' barrier. Even though I have a four year degree, all of that other shit, and am coming up on two solid years of experience.

The bonus of this job is that law school is literally right across the street, so. I can just walk over when I'm done.

One of these days I'll make actual money.

Auspice

@Derp said in The Work Thread:

One of these days I'll make actual money.

I'm still telling myself this.
Yet here I am, thrilled to be in a 6-month contract, making $15k/yr under average for the role.

gryphter

@Auspice Upvote for support, downvote for content.

Alamias

I have been doing web development for almost 20 years, and I still feel like an impostor every single day. I fell into this career on accident, it was something I never aspired to, nor did I ever have any formal schooling or training. I am constantly having to look up syntax for things that I use almost every damn day because I can't remember it even after 20 years of almost daily use.

Within the last year I have been forced into a design role for UI/UX as well, and I feel even more like an impostor as I try to come up with color schemes, typography and layout for our applications. I found it so much easier to just code what other people came up with, but coming up with this shit is...hard.

I constantly think someone if finally going to look at me and go 'WTF? This guy has no idea.' and that will be that.

Ganymede

@Derp said in The Work Thread:

The bonus of this job is that law school is literally right across the street, so. I can just walk over when I'm done.

If you can get that paid for by the government? Great.

Otherwise, you may want to look into becoming a lawyer in another jurisdiction. I suggest North Dakota or Alaska.

Washington D.C. and other large cities is where lawyers go to die. Then you either become a King in Hell, or one of the enslaved.

Auspice

I completed my Table of Contents for this documentation last week.

I know once I'm "into" the writing, I'll be able to coast on through.

But outlining it is proving to be difficult. I know I'm not alone in this. I follow tech writer blogs. This is, legitimately, the most difficult stage. But shit if I don't feel like a failure right now.

Snackness

@Alamias Saaame. I tell people all I do is google how to do things but no one believes me.

It's also taken me 20 years to realize that every single website is held together with toothpicks and bubble gum.

Derp

@Ganymede said in The Work Thread:

I suggest North Dakota or Alaska.

Spain is the ultimate goal.