How to Be a Paralegal

Make Sure You Really Want the Job

• According to the American Bar Association, a paralegal (or legal assistant) is defined as "a person qualified by education, training or work experience who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation, governmental agency or other entity who performs specifically delegated substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible."
  As a paralegal, you will perform administrative tasks like filing, retrieving and organizing documents, photocopying and numbering pages. Depending on the employer, you may get to participate in more glamorous tasks, such as interviewing witnesses or drafting legal documents.

  There are essentially two major types of law that are practiced in America: corporate and litigation. Corporate law deals primarily with the dealings of companies, which may, for example, be looking to merge or to acquire new entities, and need lawyers to prepare all the paperwork. Litigation is the more typical type of law, involving one party suing another.

  As a corporate paralegal, you will probably put together record sets. These are large binders filled with primary documents associated with particular business deals. Say a company buys a shopping mall -- a record set of the deal might include the contract to purchase the mall, the leases of all the current tenants in the mall, and all of the tax forms associated with such a purchase. You, as paralegal, would get to photocopy the documents, make sure that they are the final versions (i.e., no rough drafts or preliminary versions), and ensure that they are all in the proper order.

  As a litigation paralegal, you will handle the documents associated with trials: motions, which petition the judge for favorable rulings; briefs, which set out the arguments supporting your motions; and depositions, which are interviews of witnesses taken under oath but before the trial begins. You'll spend hours making sure the pages of all of these documents are identical in each set. You'll also do a lot of indexing -- describing the documents in a computer database, putting papers in boxes, and labeling them so attorneys can find them later.

  There are many benefits to being a paralegal. For one, the experience may help you figure out what to do with your life. It might help you decide if you want to be a career paralegal, if you want to go to law school or if you want to avoid the legal profession entirely.

  Being a paralegal might help you get into law school. Admissions officers may think your experience as a paralegal demonstrates that you have carefully considered your decision to enter the field. Also, if you can befriend and impress an attorney or two at your firm, their recommendations could be huge. Remember: Work hard and impress.

  A position as a paralegal may help you get another job. If you work as a paralegal at an investment bank, an insurance company or any other major business, there are opportunities to move laterally within the company.

  Paralegals' salaries fluctuate from city to city--and, to a lesser extent, from firm to firm. Currently, the average starting salary for a paralegal in the United States is $21,000 to $22,000. This is a base salary for working from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, with a 1-hour lunch break.

  The bad news is that many employers (particularly large law firms) won't let you escape with such normal hours. If there is work to be done on an important deal or trial, you may be expected to stay late, perhaps until 10 p.m. or so. You might also be expected to come in on weekends. Of course, these workloads and expectations vary, so ask before you sign up. And for a real answer, ask the paralegals who work there, not the person who is trying to hire you.

  The rest of the good news is that you get paid extra for these hours. In major New York City and Washington, D.C. firms, paralegals are paid time-and-a-half for overtime--any hours over the basic 35-hour work week. This amounts to $21 per hour. Also, you can often make double overtime if you work really crazy hours (anything after 3 a.m. or on Sundays and holidays). So if you put in long hours, you're looking at a salary as high as $60,000 a year. And when you work those long nights, your firm will probably give you free food and a cab home.

  All in all, being a paralegal is a relatively flexible position. Many non-law-firm jobs do not require (or even permit) overtime. On the other hand, crazy hours are impossible to avoid at many large law firms. So you can opt for a cozy lifestyle with livable hours or make some serious cash.