While working for a litigation support company, I once had a boss whose determination to improve the bottom-line was so single-minded and narrowly focused that he failed to realize the company was suffering as a result. As president of a division of the parent corporation, I participated in regular but painful executive meetings. My anguish was compounded by the fact I had to fly 2,000 miles across the country to attend these anxiety-ridden “let’s-beat-up-the-managers” conferences, sometimes trekking through heavy snow storms and icy runways to be there. At one meeting, a shaking vice-president took a big gulp and bravely pointed out to this so-called billionaire, this self-centered Chairman of the Board with the iron fist, that employees were consistently working 90 hour weeks, not paid overtime and stressed to the max. His response? “Drive the horses harder.”

“They’ll drop at the finish line,” I retorted. It was out of my mouth before I stopped to think. (Yep, true story.)

We all like to think that when we’re the boss we’ll run our firms the way we always imagined a well-oiled team is supposed to work: we’ll give lots of positive feedback, maintain an open-door policy, and eschew harsh criticisms. We imagine ourselves well liked with an adoring staff, and tell ourselves we will make few bad decisions. Promotion to the top of the career ladder—here we come!

Hel-loooo!!! Are we all on the same page here?

Are You A Bad Boss?

In A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses, author Gini Graham Scott writes that employee perceptions can be difficult for a boss to judge because employees are naturally—and understandably—reluctant to criticize their employer’s behavior, even when asked to do so. “Getting reliable feedback from your employees will be very hard,” Scott says. “Even if they like you, even if they trust you, they are still dependent on you for a paycheck and most won’t risk that to tell you the truth.”

In large firms, the effect of a single bad boss is mitigated by the firm’s sheer size. There’s always someone else to go to, a committee to complain to or a different department into which to transfer. The smaller the team of employees, the greater the impact employee disaffection with the boss can have on day-to-day functioning. Tension between the team leader and staff can dramatically hurt the entire firm through reduction of employee productivity. And those in law firms know what that means: fewer billable hours—the real career buster of most revenue-generators.

In their book, First Break All the Rules, authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of 80,000 managers and one million employees. Their straightforward conclusion: Bad bosses hurt their companies. The worst effect of bad bosses was to drive good people away. “So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people—in the form of better pay, better perks and better training—when, in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue,” the authors write.

To avoid becoming a bad boss, watch your staff’s behavior. Rapid employee turnover is the number one sign of management problems. If you notice that your firm has a revolving door of paralegals, secretaries and other staff with whom you directly interact, that may be a sign that you are difficult to work for.

Bad Bosses Come In Four Varieties

There are four types of bad bosses, explained below, along with some advice for avoiding the traps they set.

#1: The Micro-Manager

This boss won’t let her employees do their jobs. She generally requires employees to obtain permission for every little action. Some problems stem from the fact that many paralegals are promoted from within. They have built up their territory, established procedures and spent a good deal of time running the office themselves. So when the firm expands and more paralegals or staff comes on board, they resist letting others make the decisions they’ve been making themselves for so long. While it’s understandable that no one wants a newcomer to rock the boat, you limit the possibility of expansion if you don’t let anyone else do the work.

The best way to avoid falling into the Micro-Manager trap is to hire the best paralegals, legal assistants and other staff you possibly can and let them do their jobs. When you have confidence in your team, you’ll be able to focus on your own job and not hover over others. However, if you aren’t confident that your staff will make good decisions, you probably haven’t hired the right people.

#2: The Mini-Manager

Can’t make decisions? Put off making decisions that are not directly related to assignment areas? Not interested in anything but productivity and quality? If you answered yes, you’re a mini-manager, which is the opposite of the micro-manager. Employees depend upon their boss for quick decisions that directly impact their work and ultimately impact their personal lives. If as a manager you drag your feet, especially on critical issues such as raises, reviews, seminars and scheduling vacations, employees tend to get just plain angry because they conclude that you don’t care. Once your staff realizes that nothing is urgent for you, their work will reflect the same lack of urgency. Timely decision-making and paying attention to decisions affecting home life all factor into your reputation as a boss. Don’t hang your staff out to dry simply because you can’t or won’t make a decision outside the scope of the assignment. Find the time, resources or support to make your staff’s issues matter.

Post from: The Complete Lawyer

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Today, four trends are reshaping the paralegal field. Ignore these at your peril: if you don’t educate yourself about the latest innovations in legal, social and business practices, you’ll be left sitting on the dock as the ship pulls away.

1. Learn About Social Networks

Even if you don’t understand what all the excitement is about (particularly if you are past 40), web-based social networking is hotter than ever. Sites such as Facebook, My Space, Linkedin, and other Web 2.0 communities have enabled millions of people to amass a rich network of old and new friends. With the click of the mouse, you can learn more about them than you could have shared in years.

Once you create a profile that includes your date of birth, home town, high school, college, employer, political views, and marital status, you start inviting people to be your friend. Other people invite you to be their friend, too, including people you don’t even know. On business networking sites such as LinkedIn, business “friends” write references for you and people are introduced to potential clients, employers and colleagues. You can even send a virtual martini to a sales prospect to break the ice.

Originally designed for college-age kids, Facebook now boasts that more than half of its 43 million members are of post-college age. Members post pictures of their pets, children and loved ones along with information about their personal lives, hopes, wants, dreams and desires.

Be advised, though: by participating in social networks, you’re giving employers and potential employers the opportunity to learn about you and check your references. No employers investigate only the references a potential employee supplies; today, even Googling is but one small component of background checks. Whatever you post on your site becomes available to those who want to learn about you. Make sure that you don’t post more about yourself than you’d feel comfortable having your employer know.

2. Offshoring Creates New Opportunities

Mention offshoring and most paralegals and attorneys storm out of the room. But outsourcing does not appear to be fading away. Hiring attorneys in India or the Philippines is a hot trend. Lawyers from large and small firms outsource assignments to workers in other countries. According to a recent article in Business Week magazine, DuPont’s legal department, always a legal trendsetter, figures 70% of the labor in a typical insurance or liability case can be outsourced.

U.S. law firms often bill around $150 an hour for document-processing by paralegals; offshore providers charge around $30 an hour—because an attorney with five years of experience can be hired for around $30,000, including benefits, in the Philippines, whose legal system is similar to America’s. That’s half what a veteran U.S. corporate paralegal earns, and one-fifth what a first-year attorney can fetch in New York.

According to a recent article in The International Herald Tribune, clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The average Indian lawyer working in an outsourcing organization earns $8,160 per year compared to $160,000 for a first-year associate in a major U.S. law firm. These outsourcing firms or Legal Process Outsourcing (LPOs) are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Forrester Research in Boston.

The National Federation of Paralegal Association’s Position Statement on the Outsourcing of Paralegal Duties to Foreign Countries, claims that paralegals in India earn from $6.00-$8.00 per hour. This represents a huge bargain for U.S. firms if the quality of the work is on a par with what is being accomplished here.

Companies with corporate legal departments in India include DuPont, Cisco Systems, and Morgan Stanley, according to ValueNotes Database, a company based in Maharashtra, India. The Indian legal services industry will more than quadruple to $640 million by 2010 from $146 million in 2006, ValueNotes said.

Although not every firm will outsource work and certain ethics issues remain to be resolved, the trend will likely continue, following the trajectory of what happened 10–15 years ago when coding was outsourced to the Philippines. Then, too, everyone was concerned that paralegal jobs would be lost, but the field continued to grow and assignments became more sophisticated.

Paralegals claiming outsourcing will never affect them may have their Bates stamps buried in the sand. Corporations will continue to demand that small businesses and individuals lower their legal fees. Firms, especially smaller ones, cannot necessarily hire additional personnel every time a new or different case comes over the transom. Outsourcing gives every size firm an opportunity to capture new work without additional overhead.

Does this mean that paralegal jobs are going away? Not necessarily. It does mean that paralegals have to work smarter and aim for higher level assignments. Leveraging your knowledge, skills and technology abilities is the key to planting your feet firmly on the firm’s travertine floors and keeping salaries up.

3. Regulation Is Here To Stay

If only Enron, WorldCom, Computer Associates, Qwest, Comverse, Adelphia and others hadn’t generated so many business scandals and provoked a cry for a crackdown on white-collar crime, we probably wouldn’t have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act with its rigid and onerous reporting requirements. According to Forbes (October 29, 2007), the number of FBI corporate fraud cases pending has risen 70% since the act’s passage in 2002. It’s not going to be repealed; in fact, it’s considered one of the most important changes in business this country has seen, and is taken so seriously that several privately held corporations have adopted a “Sarbanes-Light” approach to governance in the event they eventually do go public or merge.

With the fear of prison and the scalps of white-collar defendants fresh in their minds, corporations began to hire compliance experts—including paralegals—to help keep the corporation in line with government regulations and out of the sight of the SEC. Compliance paralegals are generally hard to find. Few, if any, paralegal schools offer a certificate in the practice specialty, yet the position continues to grow. In all likelihood, the trend for stricter adherence to regulation, tighter accounting procedures and higher corporate morality is not going away. Paralegals gravitating toward this area are likely to find exciting, well-paid positions.

4. E-Discovery Creates Exciting New Positions

Unless you completed your first day in paralegal school only yesterday, you know about e-discovery and the changes it has brought to every practice specialty imaginable. Electronic discovery—how people and businesses conduct themselves, what they write in an e-mail, say in a voicemail or put in a blog or website—has changed the face of the legal field. This also means that the number and type of assignments for paralegals has increased and changed, particularly in the discovery and risk management arenas.

A brand new position, the e-discovery manager, has emerged. This person’s first responsibility is to reduce costs by managing vendor selection. E-discovery managers also enable organizations to proactively prepare for litigation. A screw up in e-discovery, such as removing metadata during document productions, can result in sanctions or a court issued adverse inference. Managers also create a consistent process for e-discovery projects that includes data collection, processing and review.

According to Inside Counsel magazine, an organization can expect to pay e-managers between $100,000 and $300,000 a year. There’s no reason why this position cannot be handled by paralegals with expertise in the field.

Paralegals Will Be Increasingly Subject To Regulation

At least 12 states have passed or seriously debated legislation regulating paralegals. Laws such as California’s Business & Professions Code 6450 came into effect because people with little or no training were delivering inappropriate services directly to the consumer.

These regulations mandate educational background and establish mandatory continuing education requirements, changes that ensure that paralegals stay current on the latest changes in the law, ethics, procedures and techniques.

These educational and regulatory trends are expected to continue. As a result, paralegals will be smarter, better educated, and earn higher incomes. Trends are a fact of business life. How should you handle them? As John Naisbitt, best-selling author of Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 was known to say, “Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.”

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