Ki Hwang is CEO and general counsel at Cincinnati-based Bright Line Counsel. Prior to that he served...
Bob Roberts is president and COO at Cincinnati-based Bright Line Counsel. Previously, he was managing partner at...
Carl H. Morrison, ACP, RP, PP, AACP, is an experienced certified paralegal and paralegal manager and has...
Published: | November 25, 2021 |
Podcast: | Paralegal Voice |
Category: | Legal Technology , Paralegal |
Carl is joined by Ki Hwang and Bob Roberts of Bright Line Counsel, an Alternative Legal Service Provider (ALSP). Learn how the field is not only streamlining legal ops and more efficiently serving clients, but also creating exciting opportunities for paralegal professionals.
Hear how today’s paralegals can leverage their project management and technology skills to advance their careers and focus on meaningful, rewarding work. It’s a whole new world, and paralegal professionals are at the center of it.
And in the Listener’s Voice segment, Carl takes a question about getting into the field of legal operations and offers tips on making the leap. Is this the next step in your own career? If you’ve got a comment or question, reach out at [email protected]
Special thanks to our sponsors NALA, ServeNow, and InfoTrack.
NALA: https://www.nala.org/
Bright Line Counsel LLC: https://brightlinecounsel.com
[Music]
Carl Morrison: Hello everyone, welcome to The Paralegal Voice. You’re on Legal Talk Network. I’m Carl Morrison, a legal operations manager and advanced certified paralegal and your host of The Paralegal Voice. Before we start today’s show, we’d like to thank our sponsors, NALA, ServeNow, and of course our newest sponsor, InfoTrack. Well, everyone I have a couple of great guests. So today, it’s double your pleasure show. So these two particular guests, and I’m saying wonderful guests because they are. They share a passion for our legal industry and legal operations. I am so honored to have with me on today’s show, Ki Hwang and Bob Roberts of Bright Line Counsel, so please help me welcome to The Paralegal Voice family, Ki and Bob, welcome guys.
Ki Hwang: Hi, everyone.
Bob Roberts: Thanks for having us.
Carl Morrison: So today, we’re going to talk about in-house paralegals and next generation of legal services delivery. Basically, having the right technology, the right people and processes for legal projects and, you know, there’s a lot of articles out there on legal project outsourcing and what’s known as alternative legal service providers, and there’s a lot to unpack with this particular topic. And of course, we don’t have all the time in the world so we’re going to kind of distill this down, but I kind of want to start it at a high level first. You know, law firms and more importantly, you know, in-house corporate legal departments. Everyone knows we’re doing more with less now and one area to help with this particular challenge is this rapid growth concept called ALSPs or Alternative Legal Service Providers. And so, Ki, I want to ask you first, let’s talk high level. What is an ALSP?
Ki Hwang: An ALSP or companies that specialize in providing innovative approaches to common legal issues that law firms and corporate legal departments confront.
Carl Morrison: Okay, and so, they’re an additional resource for a law firm or an in-house corporate legal department to — when they need additional help, correct?
Ki Hwang: Correct.
Carl Morrison: So, Bob, let me ask you. Would you say that an ALSP are really only for high-volume relatively routine legal tasks or are they valuable in other ways to a legal team? You know what services? Let’s start there, what services really do ALSPs actually offer?
Bob Roberts: Sure, so I guess to answer the second question first, while the bread and butter of what we do are large relatively routine legal tasks, it’s sort of morphed now into — there are a lot of companies that are really good leveraging people. They have a lot of smart — leveraging technology that have a lot of smart people, have a lot of really good processes. So really, our job is to find a way for any legal or compliance-related task to run it as efficiently as possible. And obviously, the end goal there is being as cost effective as possible on top of that. So we’re as we started with large-scale litigation, class actions, large-scale government subpoenas, FCC, DOJ, we’ve sort of morphed into more substantive legal work with our legal professionals.
So as far as services, we do document review-related to subpoenas, manage document review, which means we have project managers that oversee it. So it’s basically applying business principles to the review of documents to make sure we’re doing it as efficiently as possible. We also do — we’ve been asked by our clients — I’d love to say we think of these service offerings, but they’ve been need-driven by our corporate law firm clients by saying basically, you know, you’ve helped us on these big cases, you know our people, you know our documents, you know our C-suite. Can you help us work on these large-scale mergers and acquisition matters? We’re going to buy a bunch of competing businesses or something like that. We are able to help draft and revise contracts, we’ve done IP cases. There’s really no limit. If you have a large amount of data and you need to leverage technology to get through that data as quickly as possible, that’s really where companies like ours come in, but it doesn’t have to be large volume. It can be it can be smaller volume, especially the more you work with a company or a law firm, the smaller it can be and then you have a seamless handoff from our team and their team. So we’re really here to support inside counsel, outside counsel; the paralegals who can be running the cases. Basically anybody who needs support, that’s where we come in.
Carl Morrison: Yeah, and you mentioned about like subpoena processing. It reminded me of an actual anecdotal situation of where we, our particular company utilizes —
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— Basically an LSP where it is really one lawyer, but this particular lawyer that we have engaged for several years assists us when dealing with subpoenas and you mentioned like DOJ and the FCC and the big governmental subpoenas that happen, that’s where we use this particular individual to assist us in making sure that the volume of data that we’re providing, we’re not inadvertently producing confidential information or privileged information that we’re producing what’s being asked for. And this particular service provider can do it efficiently and effectively and as a result, when I started five years ago with the company, we were able to streamline the processes when it came to like the subpoena processing and engaging this ALSP. We reduced our cost by 40 percent which is a huge thing just in subpoena processing. And so, Bob, you’d agree that an ALSP is someone that can really help if you use them properly, can really help reduce some of the costs in situations like that wouldn’t you agree?
Bob Roberts: Absolutely. And to your point, a lot of this work — subpoena, third-party subpoena specifically where you don’t have a dog in the fight and you want to make sure that you don’t do something that that puts you in the fight, right? So, that work tends to sort of flow downhill and a lot of the paralegals I’ve spoken with, they have very important jobs that they need to be attending to on a day-to-day basis, but they’re constantly getting hit with these third-party subpoenas. So they’re pulled in 50 different directions and so what were able to do is say “it’s okay, let us see the subpoena and we can help you grab the data, we’ll collect the data. We’ll call the data. We’ll review it and provide you with what we think you need to see.” So then we’ve cut their time and their responsibilities significantly down once that we build that efficiency working together and then they’re able to just have the documents they want and it’s one less thing off their plate so they can focus on their jobs on a day-to-day basis.
Carl Morrison: That’s a great point and Ki, I want to ask you besides like subpoena processing. I mean, what would you say or like, give me like top three reasons really for and engaging an Alternative Legal Service Provider? And I mean, if you got more than three share them.
Ki Hwang: No, I think the three top factors of that benefit clients and reaching out to, or seeking out ALSPs is better access to technology, specialization, like we just discussed about with the subpoena process. You create a lot more efficiencies to reach out to a service provider who has that unique specialization to create a better workflow, so it increases efficiencies. And then the value added billing, right? So for example, when you reach out to companies like ours, ALSPs, we’re in a position to provide clients with better access to technology with specialization in a specific subject matter area and then also, value-add which is reduced billing for them.
Carl Morrison: You mentioned technology, Ki, and one of the things that pops in my brain is we see it all the time. All the articles – and bombarded with all sorts of stuff as it relates to AI and utilizing AI. Would you say that AI is a huge asset when we’re talking about engaging an ALSP?
Ki Hwang: It is a huge asset, Carl. Think about the document review industry. Ten years ago when people talked about doc review, you would probably collect 10,000 documents and performed what you would call a linear review which basically met reviewing the majority of those 10,000 documents that you collected with the advancement of technology and AI that you talked about. We’re now talking about collecting 10,000 documents and then going through the calling process, utilizing AI that could cut it down by potentially 80 to 90 percent. So this will now all of a sudden rather than conducting doc review in a linear process, you’re getting smarter and more efficient utilizing AI and technology.
Carl Morrison: I geek out over this particular topic and you know, I have seen and met with all sorts of different individuals that have engaged and utilized AI, especially from when you’re talking in-house, corporate, legal department, contracting. AI is a huge asset to have a service provider such as your company that uses technology and uses systems that embrace AI to be able to, I don’t know search through contracts, looking for a clause-related to data privacy. Do we need to reduce certain contracts? Because we don’t have the correct data privacy clause, you know?
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Ki Hwang: That’s exactly right. Carl. If you look at our industry in the last five years, there are so many companies that are popping up offering AI in the contracting process
Carl Morrison: It’s a huge, huge thing. Bob, can you give the listeners an example of we’re having a service provider such as yourself, your company has had a huge impact on a particular matter?
Bob Roberts: Sure, of course, Carl. We’re biased as an ALSP ourselves. But, really, I think the biggest advantage is the way that we prove our value to our clients and their end clients if our ultimate client is a law firm is by being as efficient as we possibly can and by saving money and time at every single turn. So the biggest advantage is our model isn’t built on the traditional billable model. While as we do have billable offering, our goal is to try to save — we prove our value by saving our client’s money. So we’ve become very, very adept at leveraging as you and Ki were discussing AI, predictive technologies, it’s not something as simple as email threading. I mean, the linear review days as Ki alluded to are well past. And because we leverage these technologies all day, every day; I would argue that we’re better at leveraging them than a lot of other legal professionals are able to do, because they just haven’t had the experience. And frankly, I’m a lawyer myself, technology can be very scary to lawyers because we are not technologists by any stretch, but it’s just come such a long way you were talking about AI.
I mean it’s to a point now with CAL, Continuous Active Learning, you can still see it. If you want to do a linear review, you can review every document you want to review, but the Continuous Active Learning allows you to — allows the system to predict documents that are more likely to be relevant to your matters. So ultimately, you’re able to elevate the responsive documents, the important documents more quickly. So if you’re nervous about the technology, you can still ultimately review everything. It’s just going to help you prioritize. And then specifically, with respect to having a huge impact. I mean, we’ve seen it not just because our price point tends to be lower and we run more efficiently which is a huge benefit to our clients. But our private — so we run through, we do a traditional managed offering, which means that we have project managers that are full-time employees that work with our corporate law firm clients, day in and day out.
And so, also the same thing for our legal professionals, we work with them over time. And so what you get is institutional knowledge. I’ll talk about corporation specifically. You get to know their inner workings. I talked about this a little bit earlier, my answer to my last questions, we’ve gone from working on litigations, to working with their transactional folks, to working with their compliance folks, to working with insurance folks. When you have a bunch of smart people, they’re able to leverage technology to run a project sufficiently, you end up saving a lot of time and money. And so, we got a case with Bright Line where a provider had collected eight terabytes of data and we didn’t know exactly what was in those eight terabytes as you wouldn’t at that point, but it just seemed for — I think it was a breach of contract case. I mean, it wasn’t even a huge case for you to expect that volume.
And so basically what we said is they wanted a quote for processing which is you know would be astronomical. And so, basically, what we just said is “why don’t you send it to us? We won’t charge you anything. We’ll look at it, we’ll go through it, we’ll try to identify what you really need to process before we put it into the system and we’ll try to be as efficient as possible”, and right off the rip we identified tons of duplicate of information. I think we process less than a terabyte, which is still a lot. But then once we ran search terms, did the iterative search term optimization process where we got it down even further, I think for that case, which started at eight terabytes, we reviewed about 40,000 documents. And of that I don’t remember what we produced, but it was a fraction of that. So, I mean, that is as you understand savings in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for their client.
Carl Morrison: And you touched on two different things that I — before we go into our break here, that I wanted to kind of briefly talk about. The technology and lawyers historically have not been “technophils”, I’ve written an article in the past about attorneys being technophobic. Even now, today, with so much technology, I think lawyers are tending to embrace technology more. They may not be utilizing it in their day in day out work as much as they want to or should, but in work such as what we’re talking about, they understand the importance of using the technology to assist in calling out what you were just talking about, Bob, calling out the data out of terabytes down to 10,000 pages of or 10,000 records. Because of cost, we are all very cognizant of costs. Cost is a huge driver of what we’re talking about, right?
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Bob Roberts: Absolutely. No cost is huge in quality. So those are our two main focus is because you don’t want to just be less expensive. You want to be as good, if not better and more cost effective. And so that’s really been our focus since day one is saying, “look, we understand what our clients need because we’ve represented them in the past, we work with them. How do we make sure that we are saving them as much money at every turn of the projects that we can, be it technology, be it contract, legal professionals? So yes, with cost.” I mean, we would say traditionally on an average matter and we can prove it up pretty easily with the numbers that we have savings of 75 to 80 percent versus traditional review.
Carl Morrison: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Okay. So, we’re going to take a short commercial break everyone. So don’t turn that dial.
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Carl Morrison: Welcome back to The Paralegal Voice. We’ve been talking with my special guests, Ki and Bob of Bright Line Counsel on Alternative Legal Service Providers and the whole concept of it. And guys, I can like totally geek out on this for hours and, well, I’ll tell everyone when I met Ki and Bob a few weeks ago here in Vegas, what? We talked for two hours. I mean, it was just if it’s a long time, wouldn’t it?
Bob Roberts: It was two hours and it went really fast.
Carl Morrison: It’s so well. We are not going to make this show two hours. I promise everyone but we could do two hours’ worth. So, Ki, I’m going to ask you, do you think ALSPs will have an impact specifically on paralegals in the paralegal profession? And if so, how so?
Ki Hwang: I think it will have a huge impact on paralegals. And the reason why I say that is most companies that offer the services we offer are only looking or basically looking for smart people who understand the process and who understand workflows. And if you really think about what paralegals do in law firms and in corporate legal departments, they’re the ones responsible for workflows and having an understanding about technology works. So if you look at most e-discovery companies, and if you look at most legal staffing companies, most of the project managers in those respective areas are paralegals who understand the process. So, I do think this industry will provide a huge career opportunities and career advancement opportunities for paralegals.
Carl Morrison: And I agree with you 110 percent. It’s not a negative impact. It’s a very positive impact on the profession. I mean, service providers such as yourself, employing fantastic and skilled lawyers for work that lawyers need to perform, but there’s also a lot of work that paralegals can perform within entities such as Bright Line that being able to project manage, that’s a huge part of what we do. Well, that’s how we’re skilled as paralegals is to manage that. And there’s so many different opportunities like you said, and I think it — I agree with you, Ki, that it is and will have a huge impact, a positive impact on the profession.
Ki Hwang: Right.
Carl Morrison: So Bob, what type of skills should a paralegal, a lawyer, a law firm, corporate in-house, what should we be looking for when we go out to engage a provider such as yourself or are some skills more important to look for than others?
Bob Roberts: So yes, think when it comes to the legal professionals, we work with, one of the things that we try to identify is a great attention to detail, great attitude, somebody who’s willing to roll up their sleeves and really be part of the team. And we value that, that’s part of our culture. We appreciate our legal professionals. This work used to be because it was seen as lower risk, “Hey guys, just go sit in the basement some place and push buttons”.
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And now, it’s really been elevated and we really want to elevate it to the point where the people who are doing this work feel fantastic about the work they’re doing. They know they’re contributing. And so I think one of the big things that you should look for if you’re looking for an ALSP is one that really has a culture focused around its people and trying to make sure that they can thrive in their environment because this technology is fantastic. We can leverage it like few others can, but at the end of the day, it’s still going to be legal professionals that are doing the eyes on work and providing their intelligence and their experience to make sure the work product is as solid as possible. On top of that, I think that as we’ve said repeatedly during our discussion here, technology. I mean everybody talks about it. There’s so many words that people love to throw out, AI, CAL, I would really encourage folks to say, what experience do you have ALSP or LPO as actually leveraging these tools. What are some of the successes you’ve had that you asked earlier, Carl?
I think it’s really important to sort of — everyone’s going to tell you they’re the best in class, we have the best technology, we have the best people. And so I really think integrity and honesty would be number one obviously, but that I guess goes for all businesses. But then also making sure that you don’t just take a salespersons word for these things, references are always good. You want to have people that have worked with them successfully. So those are the kind of things I would look for if I were in those shoes
Carl Morrison: And I will tell the listeners and we’ve had this conversation offline, but communication is a huge portion of it. And I am and I have been described as being as Kurt and dismissive when it comes to work and especially engaging a service provider such as yourselves because I don’t want a song and dance. I don’t need the bells and whistles, I just need to know, can you do what I’m asking you to do and how efficient and effective you are and how cost-effective you are? I’m not looking for cheap, I’m looking for quality, but I’m also understanding costs are a big part. I don’t have a giant purse to spend. That’s when I’m looking for a provider. I’m wanting to engage someone that can show me actual true results. This is what we’ve done. This is how we did it and how efficient we were in it. And I think those are really important to look for in a provider. Wouldn’t you guys agree?
Ki Hwang: Absolutely.
Bob Roberts: Yeah, no question.
Carl Morrison: Ki, I know you’re going to be biased when I ask you this question, but I’m going to ask anyway. With the rise of ALSPs, they’re here and it’s normally not rising and they’re pretty much here and here to stay. Do you think that they’re a threat? Would you say an ALSP is a threat or an opportunity to the legal industry as a whole?
Ki Hwang: I think it’s an opportunity for the legal industry as a whole because if you look at the last ten years, have law firms making record profits and you also have legal providers generating so much revenue. Well, where the year over year increase in ALSPs that are around keep growing exponentially. I think there was one study that basically said, by the year 2025, the spend on legal services or legal providers, legal services providers will exceed I think 18 billion dollars. So everyone wins when you have better access to technology, more access to specialization and the ability to add better value to clients who are paying the ultimate invoices.
Carl Morrison: And that right there, you hit the nail on the head. Cost and spend is huge and it’s all about being able to provide the best representation for the client. Whether you are working in private practice and your client is a corporation or you are the corporation and you’re a general counsel, legal operations manager/director or paralegal, your client is the business and so both understand that the cost is a huge portion to be able to give the best representation. And so to do the best for the client, so I think that’s a huge part of it too it’s the client, right? Wouldn’t you all agree?
Ki Hwang: Absolutely. That’s it.
Bob Roberts: Just to build on that. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity. I mean in all business operations, everyone’s focused on keeping cost down and running as efficiently as possible. ASLPs are specifically designed for that purpose.
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So, you know — this actually, I was speaking to a partner here recently and he said, you know, whereas this used to be our bread and butter and how we would cut our associates’ teeth and we’d make a bunch of money doing it. Our clients just aren’t letting us do it anymore. And so we want to find a good company that we know is going to do a great job to fill those gaps for us because our clients aren’t going to let us do this. And frankly, from a recruiting perspective, our associates and paralegals don’t necessarily want to do this work either. They want to focus on the meteor stuff and candidly, we love this stuff. We love trying to find a way to be as efficient as possible and save our clients as much money and time as possible.
Carl Morrison: And that’s why we have the advent of this type of practice group, the ALSP is because like you just said, lawyers and paralegals, we want to do more of a substantive meteor stuff. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and back in the olden days, AI was really not there and it was going through gigabytes of data at that point of trying to find stuff and hours on hours that the client wasn’t going to pay and we just had to eat it. And with providers such as yourselves, this is a huge opportunity for lawyers and paralegals to be able to do the more substantive work while you guys can do and apply technology to streamline the processes.
Bob Roberts: That’s right. That’s right and Carl, we’re talking about a process, right? Anytime you talk about a process, there’s inherent in that a word is the fact that if there is a process, there’s always ways to create more efficiencies, right? And you want to ask yourself who is in the best position to offer those efficiencies to the process?
Carl Morrison: Absolutely, so I went through the Legal Lean Sigma which applies six sigma process improvements to the legal industry and went through their 101. Their very first and it was eye-opening to understand applying the process improvements to the legal industry. And this is one of those types of things being able to streamline and improve Processes. And so guys, I could talk about this for the next, like I said two hours, so I know we’re running out of time and I’ve always have fun questions for my guests. So, Bob, let’s start with you first. What show on Netflix did you most recently binge-watched and I mean embarrassingly fast?
Bob Roberts: Unfortunately, probably most of the shows I watch, I binge embarrassingly fast, but the easy one that comes to mind is myself and the rest of the globe, binged Squid Games. I think that took about two nights to get through and there’s nine-hour long episodes, so I would qualify that as pretty embarrassing.
Carl Morrison: Well, Bob. Okay, I of course, watched Squid Game with everybody else, but I did not binge it because it was so intense and I had to have periods to decompress after each episode. So it only took me five nights to do it. So, most other ones I do watch really fast with you. So, Ki, I’m going to ask you this question. If you have watched great, if you haven’t watched, you know, but watching like The Walking Dead or any zombie apocalypse-type of show, some characters they live long on the show, and others die off rather quickly. So, I’m going to ask you, if we were in a zombie apocalypse, would you survive — would you be that character that survived throughout the whole show or die rather quickly?
Ki Hwang: Unfortunately, I’ll probably be the first to die just because I can’t stay silent and I was horrible playing hide-and-seek when I was a kid.
Carl Morrison: This is something embarrassing but I have to share on this very topic. You know, you see online, all sorts of quizzes you can take to see where you’re at on whatever. Well, they had one about surviving a zombie apocalypse and it was a very thorough survey that you did. Surprisingly, I wouldn’t last very long. So, I feel your pain there, Ki. So, thank you gentlemen so much for being my guest today. Like I said, we could go on forever on this. So if any listener wanted to get in touch with either one of you, what’s the best way for them to reach you? I’ll start with Ki, first.
Ki Hwang: Email at ki, spell it, [email protected].
Carl Morrison: And Bob?
Bob Roberts: Our website, brightlinecounsel.com has an info link where they can click on it and provide a question. Direct there and then of course, I’m happy to field any direct emails as well, it’s Bob, [email protected].
Carl Morrison: Gentlemen, thank you so much. Really, really, really appreciate you guys being on the show today? So hang tight, everyone. We will be right back after a break for this station identification.
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[Music]
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Carl Morrison: It’s your favorite time of the show. Time for the listener’s voice. This is your opportunity to send me your comments, questions and celebrations and I choose them to be read on the air of course and you can send me your listeners voice content to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Today’s email comes from a listener that had listened into my most recent podcast show where I talked about legal operations and spoke with a particular individual. So, let’s jump into the question here. Hi, Carl, I recently listened to your show with Tom Stephenson about working in legal operations and I’m intrigued about making that transition. Are there any tips or tricks you can share about getting into legal operations? Thank you, signed Dreaming of Legal Ops.
Well, of course, you guys know since transitioning into legal operations as a paralegal, I love and geek out over talking about legal operations. And if I could share any words of wisdom, making that leap where you want to — maybe you are working in-house, corporate, legal department or maybe you’re working in private practice and you want to transition into a corporate position. The first thing is to look at your resume and look at the job duties that are being asked of you for a potential job that you want to apply for. And see how you can streamline your resume to be more aligned with the duties that are being asked in a particular job. So if they’re looking for someone dealing with outside counsel management, let’s say for example or vendor management, think about what have you done at your particular firm or even corporate legal department that you’ve actually worked with vendors and actually delineate a skill that shows that “hey, I know how to do vendor management. I know how to handle outside spend or vendor spend, spending on vendors, things that nature.
So streamline your resume to make it more aligned with the duties that are being asked for the position first and foremost. Second network, network, network, network. You’re going to find and I have found and I’ve met and just recently, I did a virtual forum for legal operations, met and actually presented and afterwards an individual that attended it emailed me or sent me a connection through LinkedIn about — she saw my profile on LinkedIn. She was like, “wait, he was a paralegal too, I was a paralegal”. And now I do legal operations, and I jokingly told her that we need to start a recovery group for paralegals that are now in legal operations because I’m finding more and more often that a legal operations professional whether it’s just an entry level or manager or the director of legal operations, they have had a history of at some point in their career of being a paralegal.
And so, I encourage you to look out, look on LinkedIn, find in your own network, other lawyers or paralegals that work in-house corporate legal department, legal operations professionals and reach out to them. Network and build your network of legal operations professionals so that you can find those jobs. I’m a huge proponent. I tell paralegal students all the time. The best jobs that you’re going to find are the ones where you have a network and it’s because someone told you about it. So build your network. Network, network, network, resumes, network, skill sets. Look at what you have in the way of skills. Maybe you’ve been a paralegal for 10 years and you don’t have a lot of financial experience or budgetary experience and the job you really want to apply for is looking for someone with that. Get schooling, take some accounting type of classes. Demonstrate to a potential employer that you have that requisite skill and knowledge competency in order to do the work.
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If you’re working in-house corporate legal department as a paralegal, speak with your supervising attorney, the general counsel. “Hey, I really want to help when you start to work on the budget for the legal department. Can I help in some way? Because I really want to expand my skillset”. Nine times out of ten, your supervisor, if they’re a good supervisor are going to actually embrace that and say “sure, you can help me with this and that’s how you learn. And so, build on the skills that you need in order to succeed. I once spoke with legal operations, a VP of legal operations for a huge company corporation and asked him I was like, you know, this was when I was early getting into legal operations and I was like “should I get certified in like process improvement or anything like that?” And he said “no, Carl. A lot of times, jobs and employers they want to see actual demonstrative experience on what you’ve done at your prior position.” And so with that I say, build on those experiences at your job right now if you’re looking to transition into — that are going to translate into the respective job.
And so, you know, there’s a lot of ways that you can look at making, connect with me. If you’re looking, reach out to me. I’ll talk to you. And I’ll help you connect and work on your network. Because in that, what we’re supposed to do is help each other out as professionals. And so there’s a lot you can do, don’t feel discouraged that you can’t make that transition, just build. Build on the skills that you have, add additional skills necessary to be a competent legal operations professional and before you know it, you’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing. And so, I encourage you guys to reach out to me if you have any questions or anything and with that, sadly, that’s all the time we have today for The Paralegal Voice. And again, if you have any questions, you can email them to me at [email protected] and of course, stay tuned for more information and upcoming hot podcasts for exciting paralegal trends, news and engaging and fun interviews from leading paralegals and other leading legal professionals.
And I want to wish everybody happy holidays. It’s that time of the year, and so happy holidays to you and your family and friends, I’m wishing you all the best for the remaining year and for the new year to come. Thank you for listening to The Paralegal Voice, produced by the broadcast professionals at Legal Talk Network. If you like more information about today’s show, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Find Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or download Legal Talk Network’s free app on Google Play and iTunes and reminding you that I’m here to enhance your passion and dedication to the paralegal profession and make your paralegal voice heard.
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The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.
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The Paralegal Voice provides career-success tips for paralegals of any experience level.