How a Paralegal Becomes the Law Firm’s Director of Operations

Ann Pearson: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome back. It’s Ann Pearson with the Paralegal Coach Podcast Show. Welcome back. So we’ve got an interview this week, and this is one that I’ve been waiting for a while. I don’t even know if Jacob knows this yet, but I was stalking him on LinkedIn for a while and what caught my eye initially?

Was a post that he had put out that was very valuable. It had a lot of content. I can’t remember what he was trying to teach paralegals in the post. And at the end of the post he said something, and don’t quote me, but something along the lines of, share it with your colleagues or hoard it. You do you.

Something like that. And I thought, oh my gosh, I’ve got to have Jacob on the show. So Jacob Reader is the director of operations at Kalikhman and Rayz, and they’re a firm in Philadelphia. He started out his career as a receptionist, no paralegal [00:01:00] certificate, just a receptionist thrown into a law firm. And he tried to figure it out, and I think he figured it out really well because he’s now the director of operations.

And I think that Jacob’s story on how he took that position and against all odds. Then turned it into a paralegal position where he was a litigation paralegal for about eight years and is now the director of operations. And I think if nothing else, what I hope from Jacob’s story that you’ll get out of this is that you don’t have to have an official paralegal title.

You don’t have to be stressed about taking that first job. That isn’t the ideal job. What it’s really about, I think, with Jacob’s story is what you take out of those positions and where you take those positions regardless of what your title is. So welcome to the show, Jacob, and thanks so much and I appreciate you having me on.

Jacob Reeder: That was a great [00:02:00] introduction and it’s fun to hear it all squeezed into just a minute or two because it’s a long time, eight years, nine years, 10 years. Only in retrospect sometimes can you look back and see where all of those little changes, all of those little decisions added up to where we are today.

So I think that’s a really it’s a neat thing to be able to do and go back and look at it this way.

Ann Pearson: That’s what I would love to do. So let’s start at the beginning. Okay. You are fresh outta college. No job. You don’t have a paralegal certificate. How do you go from that to a director of legal operations?

Jacob Reeder: It’s a great question. And when I graduated from college, I didn’t. Want to be a paralegal. I wasn’t really looking at legal jobs. I wasn’t like, man, this is exactly the role that I want, or the industry that I want. [00:03:00] I had a couple different opportunities that I was pursuing working in a food distribution warehouse as it was an operations role, so I wouldn’t have been driving the truck or stacking the produce.

But that’s definitely not a legal role. The other role that I was looking at was a social media coordinator for, it was a legal adjacent nonprofit that helps do pro bono work in Philadelphia. Again, very different type of role and ultimately I had a friend who knew a small law firm that was looking for somebody to come in and just do.

Stuff. They needed somebody to show up on day one and just start doing, and I said, you know what, look, I’m interviewing for jobs. I’ve got my resume out there. Let’s go talk to these folks and see what they say. Again, I remember my heart wasn’t set on a paralegal job. It wasn’t set on [00:04:00] a law firm job. And I went in, I talked to them great people.

They said, when can you start? I said, Monday. And I started right? I was answering the phone, I was handing out the bathroom key. I was scanning paperwork and doing all the little things that you do at the front desk. I had two different phones and I was, answering one phone with this hand and the other phone with the other hand.

And I told myself on day one that no matter what. I ran into, no matter what the task was that was asked of me, I was going to do it better than they asked for whatever it was. If I was going to open the mail, I was going to open that mail quickly. I was going to get it all, collated just the right way.

I was going to stack the paperwork just so neatly because even back then I knew that. While it wasn’t the most glamorous [00:05:00] role or the most glamorous tasks, somebody had to do it. And if somebody’s have to do it and that somebody’s me I’m not going to, I’m not going to do it wrong. I’m not going to do a poor job of it.

And the more I do it, the better I do it. The better I do it, the more I get different tasks, more interesting tasks, right? I could see that there was that progression out there one way or another. That is what set the ball rolling for the rest of my career. It was the little tasks that as I did them, I said, you know what?

I think there might be a better way to do this. There might be a slightly faster way to do this. There might be a smarter way to do this. Why do we do this on paper when we can do a digital version instead? Why do we, sign this three different times by three different people when we could send it out for electronic signature.

Different little things. And I was lucky [00:06:00] that the firm I was working at the time was run by people who were interested in making those changes and allowed me to make those recommendations and shift the way that we did some of those little things. And over time. I changed more and more, and as their trust in me grew and my understanding of the legal system grew, I was able to make better recommendations, smarter recommendations across the firm.

Things that affected the way that we provided legal services to a lot of different people. It was criminal defense and litigation dealing with a lot of clients. And so the skills that I gained from that role. Ultimately, I worked as a paralegal, right in the same firm. I was doing a lot of the case work.

I was prepping a lot of those cases and clients, and I said, you know what? If I’m doing a lot of this case work, but I’m also [00:07:00] doing a lot of the improvements, a lot of the systematic changes and considerations about the way we do the work itself. I also have to be the director of operations. Let’s Okay.

Ann Pearson: Okay, wait. Alright. Hey, a sec. We have to unpack some stuff here first, please. How long was the time between you figuring out how to open mail better to, I’m going to start doing paralegal work. Let’s start with that timeframe. What was that time, months, years. I was going to say maybe only about a year.

Jacob Reeder: I. I think that it was a confluence of they needed paralegal work done and I was showing that it was work that I could do. And so within a year they said, great. Let’s pull you off the front desk and kind of take you a little further into the office and let’s get you up and running on some cases.

Ann Pearson: [00:08:00] Before I move into the next question, I have to point out to the listeners or viewers. By the way, if you’re listening on the podcast we are recording this by video as well. But what he said there when he was opening the mail, the best it could be opened the things that he was doing to make things faster, smoother, whatever.

A few important things. I have to point out what that is. Problem solving 1 0 1, right? So he became the firm’s problem solver. I know you guys are going to get sick of me saying it, but you know what I’m always saying. You’ve got to solve the attorney’s problems no matter what your title is. Problem solver and exceeding expectations even on the small stuff that the what seems inconsequential or the things that aren’t that big of a deal or you think that they’re not, when you’re exceeding expectations and you’re solving problems and you’re doing it proactively without being asked to do it.

So I think that automatically right when they start seeing things [00:09:00] like that, but how did you get them to see those things? Because not most attorneys aren’t paying attention to how the mail is being processed or if the phones are being answered in a great way. Or how does someone, if they’re in a similar situation right now, maybe they took on a role as a receptionist or a foul clerk or something.

Ann Pearson: How did you get them to see you doing those things?

Jacob Reeder: Part of it is it’s most visible when it’s not being done well. And so part of my goal, and this maybe goes back to some of my background in stagecraft, I used to help produce theater productions at my local high school. For years as a high school kid, it was all student run.

And I always think about my time there as trying to produce a great effect on stage. Without people thinking about all the work that went in behind the scenes, right? If you don’t see [00:10:00] all the little techies running around, dressed in black behind the scenes, then they’re doing a great job. And I thought the same thing when I started working for that law firm.

It wasn’t that I wanted to necessarily. Stand up and show them all the great mal that I scanned, right? Like they’re going to say, okay, good job, Jacob. Congratulations. You did your job right. It’s not right. Exactly. It’s, she ends clapping at the microphone. It’s not this isn’t earth shattering work, but if it’s not being done correctly, people know that.

People see that. Clients are wondering why they got a copy of a letter, but we don’t know what they’re talking about. So if we can come up with that system, it gets it in front of the attorney’s eyes faster. It gets it to the right team quicker. It makes it onto the file in a way that’s named, correctly, it’s in the right folder.

People have it right when they need it. They’ll notice those effects, right? Everybody notices those [00:11:00] effects. They might not trace it back and say, wow, Jacob’s really scanning the mail very well, but they will notice that everything seems to be running a little more smoothly on the document side of things.

Jacob Reeder: And so I don’t know if it was if it was. Self-aggrandizing that oh, if I scan this mail, the firm will be fixed. That would be a little dramatic, but every firm is made up of all these tiny little processes, right? No file is complete without somebody scanning the mail. No, no attorney walks into court for trial without.

Those copies of documents that they needed properly named and properly labeled and hole punched and stuck in binders and all these things. So to answer your question, it wasn’t necessarily that I waived this in their face and said, look at all the mail that I scanned. It was more about focusing on [00:12:00] the downstream effects and saying.

Look, we are better prepared for trial. I’m trying to make more time for myself, for the other people on this team, for the other people in this firm to focus on what they need to do. And if you know that mail is being handled perfectly well than we can all focus on the bigger and better things, right?

Let’s make that a done deal. Let’s put that behind us as solved so that we can move on. So it was more about. The bigger picture by solving those little things, once somebody knows it’s handled and they don’t have to ask questions about it anymore, oh my goodness. You I, attorneys don’t have to sit there and wonder if the mail is being scanned correctly.

They don’t have to have to wonder, oh, if we get something in the mail, how will I know that it made it onto the file? They just want it to be there. And they want it to be ready so that they [00:13:00] can jump in and do what they have to do with it. So once you’ve established that trust, you’ve laid down that task as solved, it opens up a lot of new opportunities.

So let’s talk about the next opportunity. How do you become the paralegal Who says I think I should be the. Director of legal operations, how would someone go about doing that? Now, keep in mind everybody who’s listening or watching that this was a small firm, right? So that, that’s one thing too, I think I would want to point out is a lot of people think when they graduate, they have to go to a big firm, take on only the paralegal role.

This is showing me at least a whole other side to that because, but for you taking the position in a small firm that allowed you the opportunity to work in all these different roles and see the runnings of a law firm literally from the bottom up, that allowed [00:14:00] you to be able to know what you would do as a legal operations professional.

Whereas if you had gone out and that friend referred you to a big law firm. And you went in as a paralegal working under a team of 10, 15 attorneys with a hundred paralegals in the firm, you probably wouldn’t have ever gained the skills and knowledge that you need. It’s true. There’s a lot of different pathways and some of them are only visible in retrospect.

Some of them I can only see now when I look backward, but you’re exactly right. I probably wouldn’t have been hired at a big firm. I didn’t have a certificate. I’m a fairly smart guy and I graduated from an Ivy League institution. Ladi da, right? Fancy me. But all of my, my classmates, my friends, a lot of them were going straight into law school.

They were graduating into high powered finance jobs and consulting jobs in big law firms. And [00:15:00] I got to see some of that play out in real time that, some of my friends are going immediately to work for giant companies and big firms. And I am taking my chances on a little startup outfit right in the middle of the city.

Jacob Reeder: I’m getting my hands dirty all day, but you’re exactly right. The work that I. Was able to do the things that I got to experience. Ultimately, some of them were at the level of things that senior paralegals at another firm might have been doing, or even associate attorneys at some level. The types of documents that I drafted, some of the coordination I ran with different courtrooms and talking to clients and doing a lot of intakes and getting a lot of cases lined up in different ways.

Was work that, like you said, I can’t imagine that I would’ve been exposed to at a larger firm. And it’s not to say that big firms aren’t great opportunities, right? [00:16:00] There’s a lot of different variation for different people, different roles, different qualifications. But I’m glad that I took the risk that I did.

It was risky. It was a startup firm. There were things that I knew needed to be fixed. There were things, I worked a lot of long hours, it wasn’t a cushy existence, but it was a worthwhile one, and it gave me a lot of opportunities to grow my own skillset. It wasn’t that I always wanted to draft this type of document, that’s always been my dream to draft this type of motion, but it has always been my dream to do a really good job at whatever it is that I’m doing, and if I can do a good job at this thing and then try this other thing and get good at that and try this other thing and get good at that, and know that it’s contributing to the growth of this law firm and the growth of this organization, that would feel really good for me.

And it did. That was my only [00:17:00] real plan setting out from college was I wanted to work hard at work worth doing. I found it and I did it, and that was what then. Yeah. Thank you. That’s what enabled me to make that jump to director of operations. And like you said, it was a small firm. I think when I made the jump, we might have had, I think, eight, nine people total at the firm.

It wasn’t a giant outfit, but that is the size of law firm now where somebody has to be focused on. Processes and procedures and systems. Especially now with AI and technology generally. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of different systems that need to talk to each other. There’s a lot of different considerations that need to be in place to acquire new clients, to work up the cases that you currently have.

Ultimately grow the [00:18:00] law firm or, achieve whatever the law firm owner’s goals are for growth or any other type of metrics. And so I think the opportunity to be in the middle of that growth and doing those tasks, that’s what gave me the perspective. I think the skills and the confidence to say, I’m already doing this stuff all day, right?

I’ve been fixing this. I’ve, I know this process from beginning to end because I answer the phones, I open the mail, I scan the documents, let me roll out my tips and tricks to the rest of the firm. Let me document this. Let me build this into the way we do this across the firm, across the different practice areas.

Jacob Reeder: And see how it goes, and the attorneys said, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s give it a try. And it went really well. We were able to grow the firm. We were able to [00:19:00] bring in a lot more of the types of cases that we wanted. We were able to produce a lot more of the results and get those outcomes that we wanted in large part because of the systems and the processes that.

We had the time now and the energy to focus on building a lot of firms. A lot of people, especially for your listeners that work in small law firms, they know time comes at a premium, right? They’re like, downtime is very rare, but you can make time for the stuff that’s important. And if you’re fixing something over and over and it’s taking you lots of time.

Maybe putting in one solution that fixes it for good. Yeah, it might take an hour or two hours to come up with that solution, but once it’s solved. You’ve saved future you 10 hours by spending that one or two hours of planning and fixing. So I [00:20:00] took that. I continued to use it. That kind of got me into the director of operations role.

And those skills are ultimately what made me attractive on the job market eight years after I went into legal services. And that’s when I made the move to my current firm about 10 months ago. And they found me, they wanted me precisely because of the skills that I was able to cultivate in kind of a more, in a smaller firm.

They could see what type of potential that held. What I love about your story is that it allows me to say, I told you which I love saying to people who I have been saying for years that it doesn’t take two or three decades for a paralegal to have to. See whatever their success is, right?

Whether it’s more money, a new [00:21:00] title, director of operations, whatever it is, you did it in eight years, right? Without a paralegal certificate starting out as a receptionist. So when you guys are listening to this, hear that, but one of the things I wanted to jump to real quick is for the attorneys who might see this video or listen to the podcast, because I do have some who follow me.

Jacob Reeder: I think I’m of the opinion that every law firm should have. A director of legal operations be because of being in firms. Where I see they focus. Typically, what they will do, the old fashioned way of running a law firm is when they get big enough, they hire an office manager, and the office manager is responsible for hr, for hiring, for firing, for performance reviews, raises, bonuses, getting new office space.

They don’t have time for operations. Processes, to improve anything. They’re just handling the fires every day, and so a lot of firms would think I don’t need a director of operations. I’ll just have my HR [00:22:00] person do it. Okay. When they’re in between looking at benefit packages and doing performance reviews and all of that, what’s your take on that?

Especially you started at a real small firm. They were pretty innovative, I think, to be able to know this is what our firm needs to grow. They were wonderfully innovative and they, to that end, I don’t know that they brought me on knowing that, we would get to where we were eight years later.

I think some of it was still at Survival Mindset. Of small law firms. That’s just the way it is. You’re trying to figure out how to survive the next month, how to keep the doors open, how to keep clients coming in, how to keep good outcomes. Coming out, I think it was, once we were, once we had a good groove going that they said, Hey, let’s grow this thing, let’s see if we can really push this. But as far as, ’cause they wouldn’t have, they [00:23:00] wouldn’t have been able to if they didn’t have those systems in place. Sure. Could you imagine if they did grow, it would’ve just been a big mess. A lot of law firms, especially law small law firms, they just add people, right?

They just add people. They say, oh, we’re having trouble drafting these demands. We just need to add another person. We need to add two more people. That can work if it’s the right person, and you just happened to land the exact perfect person that has all of the perfect qualities and all of the perfect, skills ready to go.

Jacob Reeder: As much as I love and respect the heck out of so many paralegals, that is a tough matchup to be just the perfect person for exactly the role that these people are looking for. What can make that easier? What can bridge that gap and make that role more accessible to a wider variety of candidates is stronger processes.

I’m not saying that it’s all about the process and you can just, hire anybody off the street and they’ll succeed in that [00:24:00] role. No, of course not, right? Paralegals have a certain set of skills that can get these outcomes, but if you build the process, you build the role, you build the expectations.

You optimize what you’re looking for from this person. You make it clear to them what success looks like and what success doesn’t look like. You will end up finding a great candidate for that role and the candidate themselves, the paralegal, one of your listeners. Will be thankful that those processes were in place because they knew what to expect on day one.

They knew what 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. They knew what was expected of them. They knew which metrics to hit. They knew what success was going to look like in that role. That’s tough in a small firm where, like you said, it’s more about. Just trying to make it to tomorrow. It’s more about just trying to get work out the door and there’s [00:25:00] no time for anybody to really think about the processes.

And you’re right, I’ve seen a lot of small firms, but medium firms as well, load that onto the office manager, who might. Have a background as a paralegal often does or at least has some knowledge of the legal process that they’re working in, but doesn’t have the time to build the systems.

And I think that’s especially important Now, you tell your listeners and you said it again today, that a director of operations or somebody that’s thinking about operations is really crucial. I will. Argue that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a director of operations, right? Your attorney listeners might hear, oh, you need a director of operations?

And go, oh my goodness, how the heck am I supposed to find and afford? Yeah, and find and afford some fancy director of operations. [00:26:00] I’ve only got, 10 people on my team. I’ve got three trials next month. I’ve got all this stuff. What am I going to do? I’m going to go to search Fortune 500 companies and find some guy with A-A-C-P-A license and an MBA and all this to run my, now it, it doesn’t have to be a full-time role.

There are a lot of fractional COOs or other types of operational folks that do legal operations that can be helpful. To your paralegal listeners and to other people who are thinking about whether they might have some inclination toward legal operations? My story, not withstanding ’cause I’m just one person, but I think there are a lot of opportunities for any paralegal to cultivate some of the skills that would be helpful in not necessarily being a director of operations.

Jacob Reeder: But in understanding legal operations generally, [00:27:00] right? You can be a legal operator without being the director of legal operations. And so this is a malleable moment. Paralegals don’t just have to claim the title of paralegal. If you start to. Muck around with your firm’s software and you’re digging through the settings and you’re trying to figure out if you can automate this one thing and you’ve got a great template that you use for this other thing, and you marry the software and the template, and now it’s this automated document that spits out every time.

Guess what? You are now a legal operator. You’re going above and beyond kind of the paralegal Call of Duty to just draft this document every day. You said, hang on a sec. I’m going to look at a tool, I’m going to look at a process. I’m going to maybe take a little extra time to dig in and understand how these things can work together and build a process.

You’ve [00:28:00] built a system. You’ve affected, it may be in some small way, but you’ve affected your firm’s legal operations at that point. You don’t have to be the director of operations to start to think about this and start to think about, maybe you can put that on your resume. Maybe you can bring that up in your next quarterly or annual review that you’ve, started to work on some legal operations projects.

Jacob Reeder: I think especially now, where AI is everywhere. Love it or hate it. It’s here to stay in some form and fashion. You have the opportunity to prove that you can master the machine, right? You’re not replaceable if you’re the person that is actually working with those systems, optimizing those systems, figuring out how to get better results from them, figuring out how to tweak those systems, use those systems.

That’s actually something that’s in great [00:29:00] demand right now. There are a lot of firms hiring people that have. Not computer coding skills, so to speak, but tech savviness generally just the ability or even the willingness to grab these systems with both hands and see what they can do. And I would add to that, that if you are going to do that, you have to share it.

Don’t just hoard it to yourself and think, Ooh, I figured out this great way of getting this pleading or this motion done in half the time, and I’m going to be the rockstar paralegal and nobody else is going to be. Yeah, you will be, but you won’t ever move into more of an operations role if nobody knows that you’re the one that created the system.

That’s right. And everybody’s got their shortcuts. Everybody’s got their tricks, right? Everybody’s got like the thing that sets them apart from another paralegal or another legal assistant or somebody else in the firm, and that’s great, right? You should find those tricks. But you’re [00:30:00] absolutely right.

If you want to, if you want to grow your career, not just your job today, not just your role today, but your career. It has to be something that you can share. It has to be something that you can put on your resume. It has to be something that’s going to come up in a letter of recommendation from your current firm that you went above and beyond.

You devised a new plan to do X, Y, or Z. You showed the other people on your team how to do it. Your team became the example for the entire firm, how to run this type of system better. It doesn’t take you away as the rockstar, right? It doesn’t say, oh, everybody’s doing it now, so like it, it doesn’t come back to me.

To the contrary, you are multiplying your effectiveness. You are multiplying your profile, and so [00:31:00] you don’t have to stand up there and trumpet it and yell and crow about all the great work you did. It will find you. If you have taken that time and you’ve built that system and it works, fame and fortune are yours, you just have to keep at it and want it and love it.

Ann Pearson: I agree. I agree. All right, so for the people who don’t know what is, what would that even look like? What would a position like that look like? Even, if they moved out of completely out of a paralegal position? So paint the picture for us. Tell. Me, what does a typical day look like for Jacob?

Jacob Reeder: So in that case, we’re talking about a director of operations role specifically. I’m not necessarily like an operations manager or kind of an operations. I’m not sure what the other titles are for other types of operations where you’re reporting, for instance, to a director of operations for me.

Director of [00:32:00] operations touches on a lot of different pieces of the firm. I like to think of myself as the air traffic controller. Okay? I’m not flying the planes, I’m not driving all the little carts around on the tarmac, right? I’m not getting people to and fro in the airport, but I have to know. All of those things are being done correctly and safely so that I, when I say that this plane takes off and this plane holds short at that gate, and this thing and that thing, that it’s going to be done without any question.

And since I’m not an attorney, of course, I’m not talking about legal strategies, right? We’re letting all of our attorneys, of course, make the right choices to get great outcomes for the clients and when it comes to individual teams, right? I’m relying on my team leads. To ensure that the [00:33:00] pre-litigation team has what they need to get great results and do good work, right?

I’m making sure that our intake team has what they need to get good clients in the door and to keep everybody happy and get them signed up quickly. My job is to take one step back. Watch it all happen and make sure that team A is talking to team B, and that team B is handing it off to team C, and Team C is making it work with Team D, right?

I’m not jumping in and getting my hands dirty with this case or that case. I can’t. I can’t. I’m just trying to make sure that everything’s running at once, so I’m looking at. Systems. So tech systems a lot of the time, right? Looking at my different dashboards and all my software and making sure that our servers are talking to one another and our remote workers have connectivity and systems in place that they can get their work [00:34:00] done.

I’m also looking at personnel, not necessarily at the ground level. Going out and finding candidates, though I’m glad to. But making sure that each team is staffed at the right levels to make sure that they can ingest and digest the cases that are coming through our doors. I’m looking at, efficiency gains wherever they may be, right? Maybe somebody will come to me, one of my team leads, comes to me and says, Hey, we’re running into this issue with a certain provider or with a certain referral source, or a certain type of client, or whatever the case may be, where we’re getting these records too slowly.

What can we do to speed this up? And I, that’s when I go in with a microscope and say, okay, let me really dig in here and like trace this back to its root cause. Where’s the slowdown? We, maybe we thought it was this person, but we’re looking through it. It’s actually somebody else.

Or there’s some other tech [00:35:00] issue. Then the last piece is not the last piece. Maybe we’ll say second to last piece is documentation. Any process is only as good as its ability to be replicated. What do I mean by that? You can have a paralegal who’s a rockstar. They nobody knows how they do it.

They just show up and they get great results. All day long. Files are flying off their desk. They might have a great process, right? They might have a great system. Clearly they do. But if it’s not able to be replicated across the firm, it’s never going to scale. When that person leaves the firm, those efficiency gains go with them.

When you work with them and they work with you to document that process, put it on paper, [00:36:00] put it into a database, some sort of knowledge management tool where you can break it down, make it visible for other people, and ultimately make changes and tweak it as the firm grows and changes. Then the person that gets hired tomorrow, boom, they are up and running with the firm approved.

Jacob Reeder: Awesome. System that’s going to get great results for the firm. It’s going to make this paralegal show up and do a great job on day one. I would say the last piece is, maybe not HR specifically, but it is firm leadership. At least again, at that, the director of operations level where I am we’re still dealing with people.

We’re talking about processes and systems and software and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to people, right? The people that we’re relying on to lead each team, the people that we’re relying on to work with clients and get great results. These are real [00:37:00] people who have families.

Jacob Reeder: They have, hours that they can work and can’t work. They have, maybe they’ve got a conflict with this other person in another team, or they don’t like the role that they are being asked to do or whatever it is. Being able to look at that holistically from a firm wide level and gently rebalance those roles and build those expectations and build up the people doing the jobs and give them opportunities for development.

Give them opportunities to be rewarded and recognized for the great work that they do, but also point out when something’s going wrong or point out where they have some areas to improve. Helping them through that and giving them those resources and those opportunities to improve is absolutely critical.

Because at the end of the day, a law firm runs on people. Don’t tell the AI salespeople that, but a law firm does still run on [00:38:00] people.

Ann Pearson:  So speaking of that. And I know we’re running up on an hour here. People are going to be like, wow, she’s got a whole hour episode. So this is great.

But I do, I have to bring up ai, right? As a director of legal operations, that has to be front of mind for you and how that’s going to affect all of those systems and processes and all of that. W what’s your let’s just have one quick question on it. How do you think it’s going to impact the paralegal profession specifically?

I won’t ask you about the whole legal profession Sure. But just the paralegal profession.

Jacob Reeder: Yeah. I think that it is a, an opportunity for paralegals to. Do better work, and I think it’s an opportunity for paralegals to position themselves more on the side of legal [00:39:00] operators, but only if they’re able and willing to retool to match this technology.

Look, right now you might be the greatest paralegal under the sun, but you’re doing everything with pen and paper. That’s awesome. I respect it and I’m sure that your current firm does too, or I hope your current firm does, but when you make that next move, there’s a very real possibility that the firm interviewing you is going to say, Hey, I see you’re doing this by pen and paper.

We’re expecting you to do twice as many cases. We’re expecting you to do double the volume. We have these tools that make it possible. Some of them, are run on AI or other types of automation. Do you have experience with this? If you say no, it’s going to be a tough sell. You don’t have to be an expert computer coder.

I’m not, you don’t have to be an expert in this [00:40:00] particular system or that particular system, but you do have to show. An inclination toward learning these tools. And so if you have this learning mindset in whatever you do, but you know specifically with tech and especially with ai, if you can show that you’re willing to learn these tools, that is enough, at least in my book, to move you to that next interview stage.

If somebody shows up and they say, ah, I don’t touch this stuff, I don’t use this stuff. I, I don’t use computers. I try not to it’s going to be tough to make that next move. It’s just the reality, and as far as AI specifically, it will, this is me being my eternal, optimistic self.

I think that it will end up. Mostly the administrative drudgery that we don’t have to [00:41:00] do in the first place. That’s my hope. I know that there are a lot of firms right now that are maybe Overindexing or Overinvesting in AI thinking that it’s going to replace all the paralegals and legal staff and all this.

I don’t know that’s necessarily a good long-term move, and I think that a lot of it will bounce back to human beings because at the end of the day. In almost every type of law, we’re dealing with human clients, we’re dealing with people that want to pick up the phone and talk to us and not pick up the phone and talk to an AI voice.

They have to know that there’s trust, that there’s a relationship, that there’s a real human being looking out for their interests. So if you can use AI in a way that. Eliminates or automates or kind of makes more efficient your drudgery, your day-to-day administrative work and frees you up. To do that higher level [00:42:00] work.

It might mean that now you have more time to speak on the phone with clients. You can focus more on the cases that are really tricky. You can jump in and do that deeper level analysis, or maybe you’ve got more time to develop your own skills and develop your career and do some of the other things that we’ve talked about today.

That’s my hope is that AI will free you up to do more of that.

Ann Pearson:  I agree completely, and I think for the paralegals who you, you probably see in the Facebook groups and on Reddit and stuff, complaining about being overworked and overwhelmed and having to manage a hundred cases or whatever, and working late in the weekends to me.

Jacob Reeder: It should be something that someone like that looks forward to and thinks, okay, is there a way that I could handle a hundred cases and still leave by five 30? Maybe there is. Yeah, it and it can be a double-edged sword, right? Because if you can, maybe if you handle that a hundred, [00:43:00] then a law firm’s looking at great, how do we double it now you can handle 200 with these tools, right?

Jacob Reeder: I don’t know if if long hours are going to be gone forever. But I will say that. It’s always worth trying to find that edge, whether it’s for self-protection trying to protect your nights, trying to protect your weekends, or whether it’s about finding the skill that’s going to make you most attractive for the next role.

Jacob Reeder: You have to grapple with this stuff at this point, right? It’s like computers. It’s like the internet. It’s here to stay. There are many people in the profession that, had to learn how to use a computer, had to learn what the internet could be used for, right? Yeah. Me ands raising her hand.

Jacob Reeder: I, it’s tricky. There’s a lot of new tech every day. It’s hard to know what is the right tool for this thing or that thing, but [00:44:00] somebody has to ultimately figure it out. Somebody has to. Decide whether this is something that makes sense with this case or that case. And as long as somebody has to decide and somebody has to understand it, somebody has to make that call.

Jacob Reeder: I’m going to be the one to step up and say, let me give it a shot. And I would challenge your listeners, attorneys, paralegals, anybody legal operations folks if you take nothing else from me today. Let that be my call to action, which is when something has to get done, let it be you. It has to get done.

Jacob Reeder: One way or the other, somebody’s going to do it right? Maybe you don’t have all the skills today. Maybe it’s going to take you an hour to fix it or figure it out. Spend that hour because not only might you be saving yourself 10 hours down the road. [00:45:00] But you might also be carving a little foothold for yourself for that next role or that next promotion, or that next firm that you’re looking at.

Ann Pearson:  I love that. And in fact, you just answered what was going to be my last question, so I think that’s great. That’s great. ’cause that’ll be a great quote. Alright, Jacob, thank you so much for coming today and for people who want to connect with you. Is LinkedIn the best option to me? I would highly recommend LinkedIn guys, if you want to get, he has great tips, but also he, you just, you have a great LinkedIn presence.

Jacob Reeder: Oh. You’re so funny. Thank you. You know what I try not to take it too seriously. I think that.

Okay. What was your last question? Was it a piece of advice that I could give your listeners?

Ann Pearson:  It was actually going to be, and maybe this might be a different answer, it was actually going to be, if you could go back to the [00:46:00] receptionist, Jacob, and whisper something in his ear, what would it be?

Jacob Reeder: Just keep going. Just keep learning. That’s it. If you keep a learning perspective, if you see challenges not as somebody calling out your failures or something proving that you’re weak, but instead you see challenges as something to overcome, a problem to solve, but more importantly.

Something that once you fix it, once you solve it, once you’ve figured it out, something that will pay dividends forever. That is what I would say to myself is just keep going. You don’t know which doors are going to open until they open. So just keep learning, just keep taking on more responsibilities. Don’t burn yourself out.

But always look for those opportunities to learn. And yes, LinkedIn’s [00:47:00] a great way to find me. I try and keep it pretty light. There’s some stuff on there for attorneys who are, working with paralegals, working with ai, working with other tech. There’s stuff on there for paralegals who are trying to upskill.

Figure out what they have to do for their next role or how they can be better in their current role. And there’s plenty of stuff on there also for folks that are in the legal operations world trying to make sense of all this craziness. ’cause we’re all in it together, right? At the end of the day, we’re all in the same industry one way or another.

We’re all going to be talking about the same tools and running into the same issues. Let’s chat about it together. Let’s see what we can do to help one another, because ultimately a rising tide lifts all boats. When paralegals come together like this and with your podcast, with the information that you do, the training that you do it makes our entire industry shine.

Jacob Reeder: So thank you so much for the opportunity.

Ann Pearson:  Thank you for coming. Thank you so much. [00:48:00] And you know what? This was even better than I anticipated, so I’m so glad that I stalked you and waited it out because, I knew it was going to be inspiring for a bunch of people in different categories and job titles and all of that, but it’s going to be inspiring for thousands of people.

Jacob Reeder: Jacob, thank you so much. So kind, thank you and I appreciate it.

Ann Pearson:  All right. That’s it everybody. Bye for now.