Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Paralegals

I bought myself a gift today, from Anne Taintor.



I called one of the placement firms today, one of the ones that didn't respond to my resume or return an earlier call, and had a long, entertaining, and depressing conversation. Entertaining, in that the person I spoke to is very nice, funny and blunt, a chick I can deal with, and has been doing legal placement around these parts for decades and knows her stuff, and also entertaining in that she validated everything I'd suspected about how the market works here. Depressing, in that all of my darkest, bleakest mutterings are, yes, how it is. And I didn't have to say it, she just laid it out for me, confirming everything I'd already concluded.

As I venture back into the legal market at almost 50 years old, it is not my imagination that salaries haven't changed in 20 years. It's true. There are a variety of factors in play, some specific to our market, I won't bore you all with the depressingly Floridian ones about naive newbies to the state who still believe it's MUCH cheaper to live here, and an inbred firm culture where the firm administrators set the salaries the same across the board. It doesn't pay to shop around because they all talk to each other, and a paralegal with X background will get paid the same at any firm. If I stay, I will be lucky to find a new job that requires only a 20% pay cut, rather than 30.

So that's this area. Here's the scoop on paralegals in general: 20 years ago, this was the career to choose, it was going to be hot, hot, hot. We were to be the extension of the attorneys' brains, leveraging their time so that they could direct cases while we would execute substantive legal work. And for a time, this was so. The New Reality: there are too many lawyers, and in an economic downturn (which we are in now) law firms are cutting back. They can function with two classes of staff: lawyers and secretaries. The baby lawyers pick up the paralegal work and often can bill it at a higher rate. The secretaries aren't what they were 20 years ago either. The paralegals are the first ones thrown overboard.

As law firm technology has advanced and anybody who survived law school did it with a laptop and is technologically savvy, the younger lawyers prefer to type their own work - it's faster than dictating it. I know this is true, I hated to dictate myself and would much rather just type it, and all the younger lawyers I've worked with in the last 10 years shared that trait. Dictating to a recorder is going the way of shorthand, so secretaries have less to do in that area. So, the law firms responded by spreading the secretaries thinner - instead of a one on one or two on one staffing, now it's routinely 3 or 4 lawyers to 1 secretary. The lawyers write their own work, the secretary is often reduced to printing, faxing, mailing and filing it, and also scheduling, which can be a nightmare part of the job. The paralegal is not needed much at all in the new law firm world order. Now, the tendency in this market is the hybrid legal secretary/paralegal, the very position I saw coming 15 years ago, when my peers scoffed.

Yes, I saw this coming 15 years ago, and when I dared to speak it among my peers I was scorned as a heretic. This is why I changed jobs and did my damndest to get "paralegal" out of my job description. Of course, I did it in an industry that promptly went belly-up and threw all of us out on the street. I'd say it is sweet to be vindicated, but since I'm among the unemployed and my prospects suck in TWO fields at the moment, it's really not so sweet.

I would have no problem with adapting to the new world order and doing the hybrid role in a small, boutique firm where I would still be able to get my hands into the substantive work, but for the salary range. And for this: Florida is taking steps to regulate paralegals via registration. On the surface, this sounds like it would be a good thing for the profession, because one would think that with regulation would come higher standards and salaries. I have a professional certification and would be grandfathered into the regulatory scheme, no problem there, but I have to make up a lot of continuing ed credits I didn't bother with in the last two years - not because I didn't care anymore, but because I was busy with my day job and my brain blowing up and such. So, I am faced with having to pay out of pocket for a seminar this month to get continuing ed credits, while faced with a job market that doesn't have a place for me anymore. Jobs will not be created via regulation. Yet, I sat for a challenging two day exam after getting a four year degree to get this damn certification, so I do care about keeping it.

So, since my husband died I changed jobs twice to increase my income and position myself to be able to live here and also save for retirement, and ended up pricing myself out of the local legal market, and creating a resume that scares prospective employers - I sound expensive and overqualified. Because I am.

Yeah, I'll be moving. I don't expect it to be much different in MD, but at least the starting salaries there are the top salaries here, and the rent is the same.