WHEN PARALEGALS WERE NEW. I mentioned that I think that working as a paralegal is good training for all kinds of careers. Paralegals were introduced about the time that I began practicing law. Before paralegals were invented, first and second year lawyers did the kind of work that paralegals did. A classmate of mine told me that at his firm, when paralegals were created, the young lawyers promptly handed on to them a lot of what was considered to be boring work. This happened everywhere. Only at this firm, after about 6 months, the paralegals held a protest meeting to complain about how boring their work was.
Another thing that happened in those first years with paralegals is that my mother reported she had heard an acquaintance boasting that her child was “not just a lawyer, but a paralegal.”