What is a paralegal and how do they relate to lawyers? In the first place, a paralegal is not a lawyer at all. A paralegal could accurately be described as an assistant to a lawyer, because although they may work in the legal industry and be learned in law, they cannot themselves actually supply legal advice to people. What they often do however is undertake on behalf of the lawyer many of the actual legal tasks and jobs under instruction from the lawyer themselves. This happens even more when the economy is not prospering and attorney fees need to be cut.
For example a lawyer with a number of paralegals working for him will be able to assign them to various tasks while he controls the overall effort, and the direction of the case, pulling together the work done by a paralegal. Information will be sought by the paralegal, they will do in depth time consuming analysis, they will create and draft documents and remove the rest of the more day-to-day tasks from the lawyer who is then free to do the more strategic work and work on other cases in addition. This is of course useful as the paralegal does not command the same level of pay and rates for the client, so this work would be ridiculously expensive for a lawyer to do and waste his valuable time on.
The important areas that a paralegal learns during training include the legal system and the ins and outs of the law, allowing the paralegal to assist the lawyer in every way. Of course the roles which paralegal are given will vary, occasionally being very menial and low level, sometimes giving them many of the more interesting and critical tasks without crossing the line. But its interesting to note that paralegals work and are needed in every field of law, so the opportunities are many and varied.
The paralegal is of course trained over time in all the various areas of law, but also they can end up working in many different areas such as commonly working for an actual law firm, where they assist with lawyers who may be the only qualified lawyer there, to huge corporations with many many lawyers and of course even more paralegal employees. It is even possible for a paralegal to contract out their services to lawyers who require help or even specific skills. This highlights something that applies to both lawyers and paralegals - the variety of different fields and specialities that can be found, making it a varied and interesting career.
For anyone who wants to move into a legal career with prospects and the opportunity to earn good money over many years, a paralegal role may be the perfect answer. With many good schools and universities in a large number of locations across the country, the options for anyone considering this career are huge. Keep in mind though that once qualified you will need to keep on learning and developing as the industry changes and adapt accordingly.
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