Tag Archives: Paralegals

When I was a paralegal, I struggled to get my attorneys to go digital. I worked in Public Finance, a department bound by, well, books. Lots of them. We kept our closed deals in actual leather bound books on actual shelves.  I stared at them like twinkling ornaments on a Christmas tree – gold and black, maroon and gold, light blue and gold. Gold, gold.

Oh, I wanted to do bad things to those books: copy all of them – yes ALL of them – into PDF files, index and use Optical Character Recognition on them to make them word searchable, and upload onto a cloud (which I used to call an extranet). Then, I would burn down those four bookshelves. BURN THEM. Perhaps I’d laugh, but that would make me a megalomaniac. Or maybe I’d throw away the books and call it a day without the whole arson thing.  Either way.

When I first started out as a paralegal, I had this fantasy of a predictable 9 to 5 schedule.

I soon learned there is no regular day for a legal professional in a law firm. The natural order of chaos always found a way to clutter my desk. Where did these medical records come from? You will not be able to find your favorite red pen under the Jones redweld. Wait, is that the Jones redweld? Looks like the labels you printed didn’t make it onto the folders themselves.

It takes a special person to be a paralegal in a law firm.

I should know because I was a paralegal for eight years. I received my two-year degree in paralegal technology and earned a four-year bachelor’s degree at night while working for a mid-size law firm in Charlotte, NC. When I wasn’t “paralegal-ing”, I was writing, which I’ve done professionally since age 13. Yes, 13.