Legal Assistant v. Current Job

I would live at home, work at the law office during the day, and attend law school in the evening. Your practical day to day experience in the law office will make the lessons you are learning in school far more meaningful. A law office experience will give you an opportunity to see first hand how the legal concepts you're studying work in real life. With respect to understanding and applying the law, if you incorporate practical law office training with your law school education, you will be miles ahead of other law school students.

Stay at your current job, David. Law school is for people who want to become lawyers; paralegal jobs are for people who want to be paralegals. Although in some firms paralegals do legal research, many paralegals are little better than glorified runners. They do filing, carry heavy objects, and generally get stuck with a lot of mindless grunt work. If you get stuck in one of those positions, you'll soon wonder why you gave up a good-paying job.

Furthermore, law school assumes that you have no previous legal experience, and law firms generally assume that you have no experience apart from law school. Being a paralegal would give you, at best, only a slight advantage over someone without any experience whatsoever, and that advantage would quickly dissipate once you get on-the-job training. Indeed, a law firm will probably want to break you of any bad habits that you may have learned while a paralegal.

My advice: stay where you are, earn money for your tuition and costs, and focus on the goal of being a legal professional, not a legal paraprofessional.

There you go--two opinions on what you should do. The person who graduated at the top of my law school class was a person who had worked in a law office and acquired a ton of practical experience. Perhaps he was just a lot more legally brilliant than the rest of us notwithstanding his practical experience and would have been the top student no matter what. Or maybe his law office experience gave him the edge he needed to catapult himself to the top.

I had no previous legal experience and graduated very near the top of my class, but upon graduating, I would have given an arm and leg for more practical knowledge. Mastering the legal concepts taught in law school is a start towards "being a legal professional," but it is by no means the end.

I agree with Joe on this one. I do not believe you will gain any significant experience through your legal assistant position that will be of any great benefit to you as a lawyer. You will likely not have any good chances for networking, either. And I did work in a law firm prior to law school.

There you go: Two opinions against one that practical law experience is of little or no value and you should rest your quest to become a legal professional on law school alone.

Good luck with law school and keep us posted concerning your progress.

Hi folks,


Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. All of your advise gives me more to chew on.

This is the postmortem on my interview at that firm. It is located in Manhattan, right by where the bull on Wall Street is. There are three attorneys and two secretaries working there. They primarily handle class action, immigration, and corporate issues.

The firm offers benefits as long as I work enough hours for their insurance carrier to approve. They asked me what type of work I wanted to do and I explained to them that I want to deal only with "lawyer-like" skills. They (the two partners) suggested that they could have me do research assignments on Lexis, draft memos and motions, and go to court with the attorneys. They seemed like pretty cool people who were interested in me working for them. They seemed to understand and respect my goals and career aspirations. The pay is still $10/h from what I can tell but it could grow as I gain a little experience.

Now, does anything in the above paragraph change what your views are of this opportunity or do you still pretty much have the same opinion? Should I try this or hold out at Citigroup for a summer internship? (I could go to the little firm, gain skills, then try to get a summer internship rather than waiting at Citi). Eh, decisions, decisions...

Thank you once again for taking the time to read this.

It is a tough decision, but I must say your description has swayed me a bit. Sounds like pretty good experience, particularly if you will see the inside of a coutroom.

To toss in my dos centavos - I used to review law firm billings and I can tell you for a fact that a lot of what legal assistants did was not too much higher on the food chain than clerical work. Sure, some of it was actual research and the like, particularly for extremely complex matters like environmental cases, but generally it was stuff like motion preparation and that tended to involve just popping the specific case's information directly into previously created templates. And, of course, typing and proofreading same. This was insurance work, BTW. Other disciplines would differ, I suppose.

I have also worked as a paralegal professor (I taught Torts for 3 years) and nearly everyone in every one of my classes was hellbent on going to Law School. Now, not every paralegal has a paralegal's education, and vice versa, not everyone with the education ever works as a para, but it struck me as being a monumental waste of money for people who were going to go to Law School anyway. All I suppose it was good for was (maybe) getting these people into better Law Schools, but the truth is that so few people actually really applied themselves that that doesn't seem like it would have followed, either. I throw that out as a possible reflection on the other people that this firm may have seen interviewing for this job. BTW, I taught for NYU so I could very well have taught a person in competition with you for this position.

In any event, I'm glad that this job at least has the potential for being real-life experience, plus it's better than volunteering, but I caution you that it may not turn out to be quite so research-centric as time goes on, no matter what the firm may have told you. A small law firm needs people to do pretty much everything and so you may find yourself making databases, typing, filing or delivering documents more than doing lawyer-type work.

One more thing to keep in mind -- this may or may not help you on your resume, and it's possible that it will harm your future prospects. If you've been paid for para work already, firms might be less inclined to pay you to be a lawyer unless your Law School career is/turns out to be stellar. You may also find yourself stuck on the para side of the lawyer/para divide if the economy really tanks.

Thanks Ticomaya. Yes, this decision is super hard. I am trying to give myself as much time as I can to make up my mind. One thing that is in the back of my mind is whether I can trust what they told me. It could be that they told me one thing in the interview (in terms of my job responsibilities) but I will endup-doing crap. These are the "maybes" that I keep juggling around in my head. Thanks again.

Thanks jespah. Yeah, good points. I can't predict exactly what my job duties might be. I certainly would not want it to hurt my resume. While my goal is to do great in law school, I would want my work experience to help lessen the impact of any "less than stellar" grades I might receive. I would definitely want my work experience to boost me up in the eyes of the interviewer, not harm me. I already have 5 years at Citigroup.

Your grades are MUCH more important than this contemplated work experience. While "in courtroom" experience will be good and valuable, I don't see it helping your resume all that much.

Get good grades, and worry less about work experience .... IMO.

Well, you should be doing research assignments on Lexis for law school, you should be drafting memos and motions in your legal writing class, and you can always go to court with attorneys if you take a practicum or clinical class. In other words, everything that this firm is offering you in terms of experience you can get in law school.

I will, however, amend my previous remarks: if money is not an issue, then go ahead and take the paralegal job. You will get some experience (probably less than they promise, unfortunately) and maybe get your foot in the door for a job after you graduate. If, on the other hand, you need the cash (and benefits) that your current job provides, then I'll stick with my original response: stay at your current job.

If you go to a GOOD law school, make Law Review, Work as a clerk for an Appelate Court Judge, you may be able to get into one of the top 100 Law Firms which pay TO START at least $125,000 a year. If you are very good and work very hard and show the managing partners that you are a benefit to the law firm, you will be able to become a non-equity partner. Those nice jobs go for around $200,000 to $300,000 per year (without counting bonus). If you are one of the best of the non-equity partners you may be able to join the elite-----EQUITY PARTNERSHIP---From $400,000 to Two Million per year depending on the firm and your share of the profits based on performance.

BUT, BE WARNED, IF YOU BECOME AN ASSOCIATE OR A NON EQUITY PARTNER AT ONE OF THESE DEMANDING FIRMS IT IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY THAT YOU WOULD HAVE ANY TIME TO POST A SUCCESSION OF MESSAGES ON THESE THREADS OR ANY THREADS LIKE THESE.

IF YOU BILL 2,000 HOURS( usually a minimum for these firms) expect to put in 3,000 hours at the firm or about 60-70 hours a week.

To the victor belongs the spoils.

I concur with Mortkat.

10$ an hour seems low to me. I won't be moving to Chicago anytime soon.