A Place to Start as a Litigation Paralegal With No Experience

The video transcript

If you are a new paralegal, how do you break in? How do you get a job with no experience?

Hi, I’m Ann Pearson, founder of the Paralegal Boot Camp, and I’m here to tell you that my recommendation is get a job as a personal injury paralegal. Wait, before you click off, listen to me for a second.

All right, if you want to be a litigation paralegal and you just can’t break into those firms that are saying we need three plus, four plus years of experience, 

Personal injury firms are more likely to hire you as a new paralegal with no experience.

But here’s the thing, and this is what you have to be really careful about. If you go into a personal injury firm and you get pigeonholed into one particular area, for example, what I see a lot is personal injury firms have different departments, right? One paralegal does intake all the way up through drafting the settlement and demand letter.

And then, when the case doesn’t settle, it goes to the litigation department, and someone else takes over the file. You’re done handling it. And to give you a little bit of information, that’s why I have a Personal Injury Paralegal Bootcamp that focuses just on that half—intake through settlement and demand management of medical records, medical summaries, client management, etc.

So there’s the Personal Injury Paralegal Bootcamp. And then that’s separate from the Litigation Bootcamp – two completely different courses. The reason I have them separated is because a lot of personal injury firms will say the intake is separate from the litigation. 

Don’t pigeonhole your career.

However, if you take a position at a personal injury firm, which is a lot easier to break into, particularly if it’s a smaller one, um, so if you take that position and you’re in the intake side, or sometimes they call it case management, client management, whatever, don’t stay pigeonholed for long.

Try to get one or two litigation cases so that you can get some litigation experience. Then that will allow you to call yourself a personal injury litigation paralegal, which, after a couple of years, you’ve got the required experience that the bigger firms that do the defense litigation or whatever kind of litigation you want to get into.

As a new paralegal, it’s much easier to break into a personal injury firm, particularly a smaller one, even if it’s a solo firm. Actually, a solo (or two to three attorney) firm is better because you’re not going to be in separate departments. You’re going to be handling it from start to finish. And they do have a tendency, although they pay a little bit lower, they do have a tendency to hire more junior paralegals than a lot of other firms.

If you can put in two or three years there and get yourself some exposure to other departments, that would be your best bet to break into being a litigation paralegal with no experience. You’re just coming fresh out of school. Let me touch on the pigeonhole thing, though, because pigeonholing is so important.

Even if you’re not a brand-new paralegal, I see this a lot. In fact, one time, as a paralegal manager, I interviewed an experienced litigation paralegal who had maybe 10 or 15 years of experience. The problem was that he’d only ever worked on one particular type of case and only ever worked on the discovery side.

So, he didn’t know about motions and pleading practice, didn’t know how to get ready for trial, and had never been to trial before. And by that time, at that mark, I can’t remember if it was 12 or 15 years of experience. He was already making so much that in order to get him from that other firm, I would have to pay him even more.

And that would have been someone who needed training. I literally would have had to sit down and train a 12 to 15-year paralegal how to go to trial, which is why I have the trial prep boot camp for that. Now you can just take that, right? If you’ve got 10 years of experience and you’ve never been to trial before, and you want to be able to expand your skills and move maybe into a different firm or whatever, or take on more responsibilities at your current firm.

That’s what that type of course is for, but so take the opportunity as you’re moving up the ladder and ask yourself at this level, at level five, um, I’ve been a paralegal for five years of experience. What have I learned so far? Right. I’ve done enough videos on this where, you know, I talk about setting goals, looking at different parts of your job responsibilities.

Get exposure to all aspects of the litigation cycle.

Take a look at those and ask yourself, have I acquired at least a little bit of exposure to these other areas of the litigation practice? Because the worst thing you can do is pigeonhole yourself and be a 15-year litigation paralegal who doesn’t know how to do e discovery and has never been to trial.

You work in a, and I see this mostly in bigger firms, you work in a bigger firm where they’ve pigeonholed you into a particular, uh, Practice area or particular specialty area within litigation and all you do is. Big document reviews or something like that, whatever it is. So try to make sure that you have the full scope of all of the experience that you want and need to advance your litigation career.