a paralegal is an unqualified lawyer, yellow pads are principally a Yank thing

Role of a paralegal depends on the law firm and practice area.

It can be a quite hands on, lots of responsibility role (eg conveyancing, where most of the work for a domestic house sale/purchase can be done by a competent paralegal) or it can be a s**tty dogsbody role (eg corporate deals or big litigation cases, where paralegals might just spend their lives in a dark room producing or going through writing page numbers on bundles and bundles of documents.

Most are somewhere in between. At our place we use them for things that need someone with some intelligence to do, but which don't need an expensive qualified lawyer to do. So general support on big deals, preparing documents and files for court, low value/high volume document reviews and that sort of thing.

Posted By: CWC, Feb 6, 14:55:02