A working day for a Paralegal

Paralegal Career History

I have been working as a Paralegal for five years. I had actually done a law degree and then not really worked in the industry after graduating. I worked mainly in Retail and then in Office Administration. I decided that maybe the best thing would be to move over to find a job as a Legal Secretary. I decided that the best way to get into the Legal Secretary role was by using the law degree and Admin experience. However, many employers felt I may be trying to get to be a lawyer by the back door, rather than really wanting to be a Legal Secretary. It seemed that the CILEx qualification was preferred to my law degree. At the time, I could not understand this. Here is my story and the working day for a paralegal.

Paralegal Qualifications

However, it does make sense as there are so many people who can’t get to work as a lawyer after completing law degrees. It makes sense for people in this situation to pursue the paralegal profession.

I found that there were a number of paralegal jobs; I still had to take training in CPD qualifications. This made it very easy for the employers to see that I had sufficient training. I beat law graduates who had not taken Paralegal training, as it appeared that I wanted a Paralegal career rather than to just pursue a Training Contract through the Paralegal path.

Working Day for a Paralegal

I am now content with my Paralegal Careers and this is because I am able to use my legal research skills and the material of my work is quite interesting. A typical day will see me get into the office for 8:30 and check my schedule. Quite often I have a morning meeting that will set out the agenda of cases that require my assistance. I will then spend 20 to 30 minutes planning my day.

Today I had to transcribe some case documents and create some legal documents. This type of administration work is quite easy, but you need the knowledge of exactly how things work and how documents need to look. Before lunch I had a brief meeting with my team, where we had an interesting knowledge share. This made my lunch later than normal.

My afternoon was taken up planning out schedules for the team, in order to ensure that we met the various deadlines imposed on us. I am working in Conveyancing and we need to ensure that we follow a set schedule.