Paralegals: The Law Firm’s Achilles (Heel)

“Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn’t that be a sight.” - Achilles,?Troy?(2004)

Most of us forget that Achilles was virtually invincible but instead focus on the idiom’s allusion to a fatal flaw. Like the mythological hero, paralegals tend to invincibly keep the lights on at law firms across the land. While ‘paralegal’ can be difficult to define, there is approximately one paralegal for every four lawyers in the US and that number is expected to continue to increase dramatically. From personal experience, I have never, ever worked with a single bad paralegal – unfortunately, I cannot even come close to saying the same thing about my fellow attorneys. However, according to the ABA’s?Profile of Legal Malpractice Claims: 2016-2019, “administrative errors” account for almost 20% of claims against attorneys and that is not including any paralegal participation in the 51.9% of “substantive errors”. While there are no “paralegal error” statistics available, about a half of legal mal claims have nothing to do with knowledge or application of the law. Given the stats on admin errors and the involvement of paralegals in the substantive side of practice, it is safe to say a large number of legal mal claims stem from paralegal work and mistakes. The ABA's?Model Guidelines for the Utilization of Paralegal Services?outlines lawyers' responsibilities for paralegal’s work but NY’s Ethics Opinion 1079 really hits the nail on the heel, citing NY Rule 5.3(a): “The only requirement in the Rules pertaining to the work of paralegals is that an employing law firm must ensure that the work of nonlawyers who work for the firm is ‘adequately supervised, as appropriate.’ The degree of supervision required is that which is ‘reasonable under the circumstances, taking into account such factors as the experience of the person whose work is being supervised, the amount of work involved and the likelihood that ethical problems might arise in the course of working on the matter.’” Essentially, attorneys need to use their reasonable judgment to determine the level of supervision required. Like most legal malpractice claims (and perhaps lawsuits in general), this is not usually a problem until it becomes a problem.?Manage your firm’s risk today, before that risk becomes a claim.

The bottom line, reliance on paralegal support increases productivity and almost certainly competence but comes with a price – beware your firm’s paralegal heel and now is a good time to dust off your professional liability insurance policy.