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“Long, Long Ago, in a Law Office Far, Far Away…..” By: Kay Redburn How long have you been a paralegal? I have been a paralegal in family law for 43 years. The changes since I started are immense. In 1983, I never would have envisioned email, texting, artificial intelligence, apps that can do whatever one can imagine, and meetings/court hearings by Zoom (seeing clients, attorneys, or even the Judge, a la George Jetson – and if you know that reference, you have been around a while)! Give yourself one point for each thing you remember or have used in your career:
Scoring: 5 or less points, you are just a young whippersnapper. 6 or more – welcome to retirement! Seriously, so much has changed in the last 50 years in the paralegal field. The most obvious is technology and the tools we use to manage a law firm and assist attorneys in the practice of law. Everything now is faster, smaller, intuitive, instantaneous. Which I believe puts even more pressure on today’s paralegal. I remember waiting for the mail to be delivered to see what pleadings were filed, what correspondence from opposing counsel needed a response, when hearings were set, etc. Replies were then prepared and sent (by mail, again) to opposing counsel or the Court or the client and so on. Sometimes there were days between notifying the other side of a hearing and getting a response from them. Then fax machines came along, and everything speeded up 200-fold. You could serve someone with discovery who was 100 miles away on the same day! You could receive notices of filings the day they were filed! Now with e-filing there is no more (literally) running to the courthouse to get inside the clerk’s door by 4:30. And as you know, with the rise of consumer internet access and the creation of web-based free providers like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the onset of email in the mid-1990s made communication a 24-hour/7 days a week process. And with cellphones we now have an “office in our pocket” that’s available 24/7. Which is not always a good thing for work/life balance. It has its benefits. I’m still trying to think what they are… Of course, the development of the internet itself has opened the door to basically all of the information in the known universe. Research and investigation have become much easier and faster. And now we have the advent of AI, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the like. My 70+ year old brain just doesn’t go there. Other positive changes:
But what HASN’T changed?
The conclusion: Some things will always change, some things are better for changing, and others will (or should) never change. Hang on to the “never changes” in your career and just learn the rest along the way. Kay Redburn served as: Chair of the DAPA Ethics Committee, 2009 – 2023; a founding and current member, Paralegal Advisory/Exam Commission, Family Law, Texas Board of Legal Specialization; member, State Bar of Texas Standing Committee on Paralegals, 1995-2015; Supreme Court of Texas Unauthorized Practice of Law Subcommittee, 2015 – 2019; and Paralegal Advisory Committee, El Centro College, 1993-1996, Chair 1996-present, among others. |