Remember when corporations were trusted entities, jobs were obtained after a quick reference check (or none at all) and all those who wanted to could call themselves paralegals?
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 houróbecause 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. If you want to learn more about online paralegal degree and paralegal salary you can find articles about them on The Complete Lawyer. 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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