what does a day as a paralegal look like?

Question

i’ve seen posts asking similar questions, but i still don’t understand the responses. what tasks do they do all day? i know they’re sort of like a lawyer’s version of a nurse to a doctor, but what exactly do they do? assume i don’t know any legal words (because i don’t, really)

In: Other

Answer 1

It is really going to depend on the firm/government entity.

I was a prosecutor years ago, my para basically handled my schedule (because I rarely had 5 minutes to check emails let alone figure things out relating to when trials were scheduled) and would keep me up to date ‘skaliton, felony 123-23 is scheduled for trial next Monday in front of judge X, I let our investigator know so he can keep us in the loop’ along with related things. They would also tend to do ‘basic’ things like sort the mail into things the office/I would actually ‘care about’ and things that should just go into the file – like a violation report where someone was drug tested and had alcohol metabolites suggesting they had a beer last night….who cares? I’m not filing a motion to revoke that will be ignored, but something like a violation because there was a new arrest for drunkenly fighting their spouse? Ok that is important enough for us to actually review the file…speaking of, can I have a 5 line summary of the original charges, what the plea was and a broad overview of what the violations are? I’m only going to have 30 seconds to determine if I should file anything or ‘let it go’. Not because I’m lazy, I’m already missing my lunch break as I shovel down whatever I could grab while checking emails between morning and afternoon court.

But there are odd instances where the para is actually the expert and the lawyer is just the mouthpiece, like in ‘inherited’ cases where the previous lawyer died/is incapacitated and to close out the case a new lawyer needs appointed. When I worked for a judge <long story short> I sat in on a negotiation for a property dispute where one side ended up having a retired lawyer ‘step in’ while the para quite literally whispered responses to him.