KNOW, the Magazine for Paralegals Fall/Winter 2013.2 | Page 37

things, fail to prepare law students for
practice. (University of Chicago Press,
2012)
The ABA Task Force on the Future of
Legal Education has been charged to study
the “key challenges facing the delivery of
legal services and the provision of legal
education” including the rising cost of
legal education, declining employment
prospects, practical skills training, and the
changing nature of legal work.
One of its subcommittees has issued a
preliminary call for states to create a common framework for licensing nonlawyers
to provide a limited range of legal services
and for law schools to provide the requisite educational programs, which the ABA
would then accredit.
In California, the State Bar Board has adopted the resolution of its Limited Licensing Working Group to “study and develop a
proposed limited license to practice law….”
And the state of Washington has already
adopted a Legal Technician licensing
scheme that holds promise to increase access to legal services in high-need specialties like family law.
In a series of columns, we will address
these emerging issues, give examples of
changes we are already seeing, and discuss
how this rapidly shifting environment is
affecting paralegals. To be sure, we are
already seeing new kinds of jobs appear in
the legal landscape up every day.
As an example, after we decided to write
on this topic, the ABA Journal published
a list of new and expected jobs, among
them: legal risk manager, legal knowledge
engineer, expert trusted adviser, consumer
financial protection bureau compliance
officer, internal investigations lawyer, client teams specialist, and law firm integration coach, wellness expert, and protocol
expert.
- Therese Cannon, Esq.

Something is different now.

I

got my first job in a law firm in 1983. The
senior attorney was an elderly, very distinguished
gentleman. He wore a suit and tie to work, even
on the weekends. He forbade a couch in the office
waiting room because “it didn’t look respectable.”
No one would have called him “old school” in a
sneering sort of way because he represented what
was fine and honorable about the legal profession
as it existed up until the end of the last century.
He was an honored, extended member of his client families. His opinion was sought on every type
of legal need throughout his clients’ lives, whether
it was a will, an incorporation, a contract, a divorce.
He attended his clients’ funerals before probating
their estates. He was that old-fashioned type of
counselor that for some reason, although needed
more than ever to help us navigate the complexities
of modern American life, no longer exists. Perhaps
that all went away when the law became an industry rather than a learned profession.
I was a paralegal in a mid-sized Fresno law firm
when Black Monday hit in 1987. A decade later it
was the dot-com bubble. During each of those
times, attorney jobs disappeared and attorneys
were suddenly competing, as they are now, for paralegal jobs. But the legal pundits are telling us something is different this time, after the Great Recession.
Something is permanent about the upheaval that is
happening now, perhaps because the financial crisis was coupled this time with an unprecedented
explosion in technological capability and ingenuity
and creative new ways of delivering legal services.
. Look at what is available now – all manner of virtual paralegal firms have sprung up on the Internet,
providing assistance to small and large law firms and
in-house counsel in many states and in many practice areas. There are specialized companies such as
Novus Law that provides virtual document review,
contract management and regulatory filings for law
firms. Attorneys are bemoaning the invention of a
new app called Shake that creates simple contracts
on an iPhone.
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