@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.
