We recently interviewed Barbara Liss, the president of the Santa Barbara Paralegal Association. She shared some great insights into the variety of tasks that a paralegal career may involve, what it is like to work on a trial, and advice for new paralegals looking for their first position.
How did you get started in the paralegal field?
When I first moved to California in 1972, I managed the apartment building in which I lived. The owner liked me and hired me to work in his office; after reorganizing it in short order, he ran out of work to give me, so introduced me to a friend, who was an attorney, just starting up a general solo practice after having made a mid-life career change. We learned procedural work together. When he left solo practice to accept a position with a large, downtown Los Angeles firm, I accompanied him — it was the mid-1970′s and my title was then “legal secretary,” although much of what I did was paralegal work. Eventually, I took my first position as a paralegal, where the title was “pseudo-paralegal” because the firm was afraid to use the actual title.
After bouncing between legal secretary and legal assistant/paralegal jobs, I took the UCSB extension legal assistant program classes at night and acquired my certificate. When I started working in complex business trial litigation, I took the title “trial paralegal.” By the mid-1980′s word processing and secretarial work were more specifically the realm of legal secretaries and word processors while working with evidence, discovery and witnesses in preparation for and attending trial were more clearly defined as paralegal work assignments, the field in which I worked. After 35 years of prepping for and attending complex civil litigation trials in state and federal courts, I changed the direction of my career and transitioned into Wills, Trusts, Probate and Estate Administration work, where I currently practice and have done so for the past five years. Read the full article –>
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