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Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 2:25 pm
by Anonymous User
2nd year lit associate at a smaller market-paying firm. The firm has corporate paralegals, but not litigation ones. As a result, a vast amount of my time is spent (and billed, and collected on) making, checking, and shipping binders. As a corollary, it is not spent doing at least marginally more interesting things.
Is this normal in biglaw lit? Or should I hop to a firm that has proper admin support?
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 2:29 pm
by Anonymous User
We have litigation paralegals, but not enough, and only a few good ones. As a junior associate, I do mostly "real law" but also spend some time making, checking, and shipping binders and converting word docs to PDFs.
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 2:44 pm
by Anonymous User
That sounds awful. I lateraled from a V10 to V50 for better work life balance and neither one requires associates to create binders. Terrible.
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 2:56 pm
by Anonymous User
Yeah that sounds terrible. I am at a lit boutique and while we don't have a lot of the perks of biglaw, we do have paras to make binders. It seems crazy not to and if you ever had to defend those bills (say you were asking for attorneys fees), the court would not look favorably on that billing practice.
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 3:56 pm
by Anonymous User
Echo others - this sounds odd. Clients normally don't want to pay attorney rates for PL work. I know that midlaw firms have had a lot of time finding good PL help lately, but intentionally leaving PLs off the payroll sounds strange to me.
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 8:01 pm
by Anonymous User
When you say making binders, do you mean (digitally) collecting the documents that go in a binder and creating and index, or do you mean actually printing pages and putting them on between tabs?
Because the first one is normal junior associate litigation work, IMO. The second is not. And I would expect a client to not want to pay for the second category of work.
Even if you don't have paralegals, I would expect an assistant/secretary or printing room employee to physically make the binder.
Re: Does your firm have litigation paralegals?
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 9:39 pm
by Anonymous User
Not OP but first anon after OP. I meant the first, never the second.
Anonymous User wrote: ↑Wed May 25, 2022 8:01 pm
When you say making binders, do you mean (digitally) collecting the documents that go in a binder and creating and index, or do you mean actually printing pages and putting them on between tabs?
Because the first one is normal junior associate litigation work, IMO. The second is not. And I would expect a client to not want to pay for the second category of work.
Even if you don't have paralegals, I would expect an assistant/secretary or printing room employee to physically make the binder.