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By: Karen George, FRP
I am a paralegal. I am a “mature” paralegal. I rose through the ranks to become a paralegal. I didn’t take a class, get a certificate or any other degree (AS/BS). I am one of the “original” paralegals that worked her way up to Paralegal. I have knowledge gathered through years of doing the work. I have experience in many different areas of law. I learned through trial and error, asking questions, watching and doing until I understood it and got it right.
First, I’m going to tell you my story and let’s see if you can relate: One, experienced over 10 years, paralegal’s story. Sit back, this is going to take you down memory lane and a road, the new, the young, the recently certificated, college educated paralegals who lament not being able to get a job, have not traveled and never will.
The year is 1976: I started working for a law firm as a runner, shortly after graduating high school. In those days, fax machines were few and not very good. Remember the rolls of fax paper? There were two choices to get your product out, mail or if a rush, hand delivered. I did the hand delivering. I took an interest in the documents I handled, copied, and filed in the court. I asked the legal secretaries questions. I read everything I got my hands on and my legal education began.
I watched the legal secretaries typing away at their Selectric IIs, rollers jammed with multi-colored carbon paper. On each of their desks sat a row of various colored “white out” bottles for carbon paper corrections. These legal secretaries were the heart of the law firm. They were amazing working machines. Legal secretaries answered calls, scheduled hearings and depositions, they typed as if their fingers had wings. These women (in those days only women were legal secretaries) knew every in and out in the legal field. I wanted to be a Legal Secretary more than anything in the world! I took a Legal Secretary course at night and “graduated” with a certificate saying I had successfully completed the course of Legal Secretary. I was thrilled and excited. I was a Legal Secretary!
The year is 1981: Do you remember the Lanier dedicated word processor? Wang? Amtex? The dot matrix printers that had to have a muffler placed over them because they made so much noise when they printed? The print wheel that always broke? Floppy discs that were huge and truly “floppy.” Then the smaller hard discs came out that held “a little bit more” information? With all the word processing machines, every office still had a Selectric II with correction tape, “just in case.” Is this a walk down memory lane for some of you? It is for me. I have seen many changes through my years in the legal work force.
I worked as a legal secretary, but on a word processor. In the beginning I worked for one attorney, then two, then three. With the advent of the Word Processor, firms realized they could assign more than one attorney to one legal secretary and the game was on to see just how many attorneys could be assigned to one legal secretary before she went into meltdown. I was young, I was good, I was fast and I learned a lot. The day came and I was tired of being a legal secretary and I became a word processing operator. No classes needed for this “move up.” All I needed was the ability to type fast (I could do that), have knowledge about legal document formatting (I knew that), know legal vocabulary (I had that) and knowledge of certain word processors. I was qualified. First, I was a word processing operator and then I got promoted to word processing supervisor. I enjoyed the work just being dropped off and handing the product back to the secretary to finalize, but this got old after a while as well. My “break” was over and I wanted more.
The year is 1995: What to do? I wanted to be on the creative, thinking side of the legal work I had been typing the past years. I didn’t know it exactly, but what I wanted was to be: A Paralegal. Paralegal was just becoming a buzz word in the law firms around this time and it seemed like the next logical step – for me at least.
How do I become A Paralegal? I started taking some courses at a local college at night, and applied for a paralegal opening in my firm. I was hired, quickly started doing the work, we had a trial out of town and there went my classes.
At this point, I had been officially in the legal industry for 18 years. Oh My Goodness time does fly when you’re having fun.
I have honed my paralegal skills through years, I am a senior paralegal (and not because of my age!) I have taken classes as I found them interesting, relevant and necessary. I became a Florida Registered Paralegal when registration opened up. I became involved in the associations of my profession. I attend continuing legal education courses to meet my requirements and have broadened my mind and my knowledge base because of them. I attend trials, depositions, interview witnesses, do site inspections, answer discovery, draft discovery, prepare complaints, various motions and memoranda of law, I prepare witnesses and clients for deposition and trial and I guide my attorneys on various matters as it becomes necessary. I help to keep my firm up to date on changes in the rules, statutes and new case law that is relevant to our areas of practice as they hit the boards. I am an integral part of the firm’s practice of law. I am integral, but I am not indispensable. This brings me to where so many senior paralegals are today, experienced and unemployed.
The year is 2007: The economy has essentially CRASHED. Firms are merging, closing up, people are being laid off and paralegals are no exception. If you were part of the flotsam of any of these economic down falls, you are a mature paralegal looking for work in a Whole New Legal World.
I write the following for us, the mature paralegals (hereinafter “us”). Us, the ones who grew up in the legal profession and became paralegals. We are the paralegals who post to the blogs, imparting advice, offering suggestions, and giving encouragement to the newly minted paralegals.
But who gives us encouragement, suggestions, advice, a helping hand? Many of us saw the writing on the wall and decided we had better get some “official” education and title. Some of us became CPs, some RPs, some got a Certificate, some went to college or university and got an AS or BS. Some of us did none of the above because we were raising our children and then helping with elderly parents. Simply put, many of us we were taking care of everyone but “us” and now, we are scrambling to catch up in a world that with every advancing step we take, the goal moves faster away from us. But never underestimate a paralegal! Hear us roar, we are invincible, We Are Paralegals.
When the hard times came to the legal industry, paralegals were part of the bottom line and many found themselves out of a job – at this stage of the game.
We licked our wounds and began putting together our resumes. Resumes aren’t the same as we used to know them, they are done differently and frankly, we don’t know the new way. So, we reach out to friends or pay for a resume service so that we can have a resume that meets today’s standards.
We are looking for work in a world that is not only overrun with paralegals, experienced and inexperienced, but a world that involves things some of us haven’t had to work with at our previous positions. We are “experienced” and yet “not experienced.”
I am not saying we are Outdated, I am saying a lot has been going on outside the offices we held for so many years and we need to catch up.
So, what do we do? I’ll tell you what you do. You stand up, brush it off and straighten your back. You dress professionally and you go out there and you start looking for a paralegal job. You join your local paralegal associations. You talk to others who have already been down the road you find yourself traveling and you network. You join a national paralegal association and you start studying. You study for CP or RP. You haven’t studied in a long time but you are a Paralegal and studying (research and analysis) is your life. You take the test and you pass the test – sometimes eventually – but you pass. Now you hold a designation behind your name, it proves to all who see it that you are a paralegal that has met the standard. You are a Certified/Registered Paralegal.
You start taking webinars, you attend CLEs (required now for your new designation) and you learn more and more. You feel the ground beneath your feet hardening and becoming more stable. You become experienced at the new game that is today’s Paralegal. You just needed to train a bit. You are back on the track and the starter has gone off! You are the favorite to win.
After all, you are you are invincible, you are: A Paralegal!
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TPS readers — Is your story similar to Karen’s? Are there any additional tips or pointers you would like to share with our readers as they navigate the “new” paralegal world? As always, we welcome your thoughts, insights and feedback, TPS readers! Please feel free to leave a comment.
Be sure to watch for our upcoming series regarding paralegal designations. You won’t want to miss it! We plan to feature high caliber paralegal writers, including Theresa Prater, RP, Sami Hartsfield, ACP, and Teri Dean, CRP. They will share knowledge and insight regarding the ACP, RP and CRP designations, the tests, tips on how to study, why it’s important, etc. The series will wrap up with an article written by Allen Mihecoby, CLAS, RP, regarding quality continuing legal education. It should be a terrific series!
If you subscribe to our feed via e-mail at the botton of our blog, you definitely won’t miss out on these terrific articles. You’ll receive an e-mail notification of our future articles when they post…no spam…we promise!
We’ll see you next time.
The Paralegal Society™ 
Karen, this speaks volumes to me!
We seem to have followed a parallel path. Do you remember the Xerox 850, then 860? I was hired for my first legal secretary job mainly because I had…are you ready for this…TELEX experience! I worked for an international tax & immigration attorney and typed on a Radio Shack TRS80…one of the first word processors. I was mentored by the attorney’s paralegal who became (and still is) one of my best friends. I moved to larger, mid-sized and smaller firms; I did the whole word processing schtick as well, and kept learning, studying and learning. It wasn’t until several years ago that I actually took courses (“A”cing them, of course) to get my “certificate.” I joined and became involved in my local association, take CLE courses (even though at this point I’m not “required” to do so), and continue to learn everything I can. Next step, studying and sitting for the RP exam…just need to make the time!!
Thanks for the sometimes amusing look back on “our” careers!
..• ´¨¨)) -:¦:-¸.•´ .•´¨¨))
((¸¸.•´ ..•´ ♥ Debra -:¦:-
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Karen and Debra, I have to say that I admire you both (and all other paralegals that share in this common experience). Although I’ve been doing this for quite awhile…I was fortunately blessed enough to miss out on the “old school” technology days. If they had showed me to a typewriter and a stack of carbon paper on my first day…I would have ran like hell. ha ha. There is a lady who has worked at my firm for over 40 years. I love hearing her stories along this same story line. She said she used to make tons of changes to letters and pleadings via this method. I can’t even fathom it. Congrats to you both for making it out of the dark ages and into the “new paralegal world” with flying colors!! Kudos to you both. You are shining examples of mature paralegals. ~ Jamie
Ahhhh . . . you do call up some old memories. I was a “pseudo paralegal” in 1976. I started working in law offices in 1972, so I beat you, Karen, by just a few years. I remember making copies on a mimeograph machine back then that created the most awful duplicates on icky feeling slick paper with really stinky-smelling purple ink. Yuck! Definitely not a favorite memory.
By 1980, I was working complex litigation trials — without a computer! All manual systems in those days, we had our original documents in original business use order, which were Bates stamped (ker-chunk) and then copied and the duplicates put into chron order, three hole punched and then into three ring binders. We then indexed them and created our topical sorts and additional document copies from that index. Talk about putting in the paralegal hours!!
I developed carpal tunnel syndrome from dictating deposition summaries into a little hand-held dictaphone (no kidding — had surgery on my right hand for it) until another paralegal pal taught me how to summarize directly from a copy of a transcript.
Trial prep and trial meant 16-18 hour days, six days a week. We were the computers in those days. Looking back, I truly don’t know how we did it. With the advent of computers, we had to argue for their use in the beginning — it was so very costly to manage documents using them, but oh, the things we could make them do!
These days, of course, no one would think about using a manual system in place of a computerized one. Newer folks know how to manipulate those systems far more readily than we dinosaurs, but we truly understand the rules of evidence in a way they’ll take years to match.
I’m teaching a Fundamentals of Paralegal Studies course and in doing so, am introducing legal research to my students — for some it’s the very first time. Explaining the old methodology of Shepardizing cases at the end of a research project caused the most astonished looks to appear on faces that I’ve seen in a long while. Those folks stared at me with total incredulity — truly not believing that we undertook that manual form of cross-checking our cases to determine whether they had been overruled, prior to the advent of computerized systems for doing so. It was a “MasterCard priceless” moment!
I could go on and on. But I really should get back to the nineteen different assignments I’ve got waiting on my desk. This old dinosaur ain’t out to pasture just yet!
Let me chime in here too…being in the same age range as Karen, Debra and Barbara, I saw the first computer…thru the door’s window before I left the country you can’t even find on the map anymore…
The business I used to work bought it’s first PC in 1992…one computer station for an office of 500…When I started as a secretary, I learned to type with my two fingers as classes weren’t available. I still type with two fingers…in Russian, but use all 10 when type in English. Old habits die hard…:-) Our word processing office was a room with 40 typewriters. Can you imagine the noise we created? All 40 manual typewriters working at the same time? It sounded as a battlefield. Later, I was told that the noise level was higher when a noise of the airplane engine when it’s going to take off…For a copier, we used two types machines…one used a mirror glass and black charcoal powder that, if not heated properly, would smudge and make you black and another, with an awful smell of ammonia, provided purple-blue copies from originals typed or inked on parchment paper…One copy at the time…Memories…I didn’t want to spend all my life typing and smelling ammonia and became an engineer…but, as an engineer, I continued to use my lovely typewriter and carbon copies…Memories…I earned my first electric typewriter in 1985. Secretaries continued to use the mechanical one…fast forward and we are in the year of 1992. More specific, on January 5, 1992, I went to say “Good-buy” to my co-workers and friends – I was going to America! One of them told me a secret that the company “just purchased” a PC and showed it to me thru the window. Only a handful of people were allowed to that room…
A few months later I was sitting in front of the better model in a college lab ready to work on my assignment…and not ready at all. I was starring on the screen with my hands on my laps for….don’t know how long. A technician approached me and asked what wrong with the computer. With my broken English, I told Francis (he became my computer hero thru all my college years!) that the problem was with me, not the computer. I told him that I didn’t know where to start and afraid that, if I press a wrong button, it would blow up in my face. He smiled, took my hand and placed on the keyboard. Nothing happened. He pressed one of the keys and ….nothing happened…just a small bip…Bip by bip, I learned how to operate this magnificent machine with DOS program and WorldPerfect (what it was 3.5? don’t remember now…)
I would stop here as the rest is…the history…We The Paralegals went thru a lot and we all saw more changes in technology when young kids can even imagine. We The Paralegals did it and continue to learn and advance in our profession. From the American Bar Association “A legal assistant or paralegal is a person qualified by education, training or work experience…” We The Paralegals never cease to educate and train ourselves.
Great reply!
This nostalgic walk down memory lane makes my bones hurt.
We still have a selectric typewriter in our office — there are some forms that just must be completed on it!
Hello Karen,
What an excellent post! Great advice for this “Mature Paralegal” who was laid off in 2007. I have been working as a contract paralegal for local law firms in Downtown St. Petersburg ever since and it’s quite the challenge — especially getting my law firm clients to PAY ME! Thank you for the inspirational message 🙂
Great article Karen! Thanks for sharing your story. I started a little later than you did (mid-late 80s), but I remember a lot of that older technology. Your article is affirming and inspirational at the same time.
There’s a very interesting offshoot discussion from this article occuring in The Paralegal Group at LinkedIn. If you’re interested, we’d be delighted to have you join us!
Karen,
I love your article. I am a new paralegal. This is a career change for me. I left the property management field after almost 20 years to pursue the legal field.
I thought it would be easy to find a job and that what I learned in college (I attended college in my 40’s) could easily be applied to my career as a paralegal. Boy, was I wrong!
I walked into my first law office knowing absolutely nothing, with no one to train me and two attorneys for whom to work. Talk about frightening! But like you, I watch others, I ask questions, I read, I research, I have joined my local association. I take in everything I can – because I am not a quitter.
My next step is my CP Designation. I just have to learn how to get started; then I’m on my way.
Thank you for your encouraging article. It gives me hope…
Hi All: I loved reading your blogs and sharing your histories! I am also a “mature” paralegal having been in this field for more than 27 years! I moved to Florida in 1978 from New York and became a certified paralegal in 1986. I now specialize in guardianship, probate and litigation. I read with interest your discussions about freelance/independent paralegals. I know I have the knowledge and experience to assist the layperson, but hesitate and am very cautious because of the strict UPL in Florida. I was President of the Broward County chapter of the Legal Assistant’s Association in the 80s and strived for recognition of paralegals with The Florida Bar. I am now looking for a position, either full time or part-time, where I can put my knowledge and experience to good use. Glad I found this site!
I especially enjoyed Karen George’s article as I can definitely relate (Air Force
JAG Office 1978), as well as small firms, large firms and corporations. Her article is inspirational and uplifting; however, what if a person lacks the necessary financing to follow through on Ms. George’s inspirations. We kind of have a “flat tire” there.
In response to Mary Jane – I will also be new to the Paralegal field as I will be starting the program next month. Your words give me hope that I will be able to find a position. I do plan on joining local groups. Karen’s advice to paralegals who progressed as she did with mostly OJT is uplifting. It does take a bit of courage to get back into school; one has to step out of one’s comfort zone. I have hoped that being a “mature” Paralegal will not hinder my job search, as I am exited about this second career opportunity.
Karen, Debra and Marina thank you for your inspiration and taking me down memory lane. Our paths are parallel in that I was called a legal assistant when I landed my first job in a law office. As a former securities broker, and trust officer, I was hired to work in the estate planning department. I drafted estate planning documents utilizing Word Perfect 5.1 (dos version) and typed estate tax returns on a typewriter. I used a lot of white out and became an expert at literally cutting and pasting with the help of a photocopy machine. I shepardized cases utilizing actual books and expended several hours photocopying cases for supervising attorneys.
Over the years, my duties and responsibilities were expanded, and it was necessary for me to attend continuing legal education seminars in order to understand the constantly changing laws. Especially in the trust and estates practice area. I enrolled in the UCLA Extension Paralegal Training Program in 2006. I was one of the oldest students in my class and I completed the program well above average grades.
Technology has replaced many of our old duties, as we are now required to take on more challenging tasks which require continuing legal education beyond completion of a paralegal training program. The certification and/or degree programs have only given this profession legitimacy which is beneficial to attorneys and clients. As an independent paralegal, I only work under attorney supervision and comply with the requirements for continuing legal education. In California we are required to take continuing legal education courses under the Business and Professions Code. Many attorneys and/or law firms will not hire and/or retain a paralegal who is not compliant. Our attendance of continuing legal education programs many times presented by the attorneys we service is truly beneficial to the paralegal profession.
Thanks for the wonderful article and the trip down memory lane. My experiences were very similar. My first law firm job as a secretary was in 1970 and it was even before Selectric typewriters. I can remember our excitement when the Selectrics made their gradual appearance in our office. I remember carbon sets, white out and I even remember the days of stencils. I was also sent to Western Union to learn how to send a telex and after sending them for my entire office, I couldn’t wait to train some of the others in the office so they could relieve me. I also worked in word processing, my first machine being an IBM Mag Card. When we got a new machine in the late 70s with a screen, we were the first in the city to do so, and I remember being requested to put on demos for clients and other attorneys. What a world! I was fortunate enough many years ago to transition to paralegal work and although I often complain about making my yearly billable requirement, I consider myself to be lucky to be still around, still working as a paralegal and still treated well by my attorneys and my law firm. Last year I was one of the first batch who took the NFPA Paralegal Core Competency Exam on the first day it was offered and I passed. I am also active in my local paralegal association and am a delegate to NFPA from my local association. I also believe in continuing education. If you keep moving, you can’t get stale. Thanks again for the memories!