Paralegal Career Development – Tips for Asking Your Firm to Invest in You

Understanding the firm’s perspective

Before I dive into how to ask and prepare yourself for asking your firm to invest in your paralegal career development, I want to give you some insights from the management perspective.

1. Not all firms have funds set aside specifically for paralegal training.

I know that’s not a good thing, but it’s not always the case.

Back in the day, when I was a paralegal manager, I had a paralegal come to me, and she wanted to attend a paralegal training program. I was really new to the firm. I reached out to the HR department and asked what the budget was for paralegals and what the approval process looked like.

That’s when I was told there was no budget money set aside for paralegal training, and this was an AmLaw 200 firm! We’re not talking about a small firm here. I remember at the time responding with, “The firm brings in $250 million a year in revenue and has no budget for paralegal professional development?”

I then spoke to the managing partner, who said, “Well, all you have to do is ask.” The practice group leaders were able to use some of the funds they have for their attorneys’ professional development. Luckily for that paralegal, she worked in a practice group that had a good leader, and the request for the paralegal training was approved using funds from their attorneys’ professional development budget.

Learn about the Pros and Cons of Solo vs Large Firms.

I know what you may be thinking – and I agree – why is there a budget for attorney professional development and not paralegal career development? Honestly, that could be a whole other blog series on its own.

We’ll stick to how you can get the funds when you need them for your career development, but I wanted to share that story to give you insight into what might be happening at some firms. There may not be an official budget for paralegal career development, but there could be the opportunity for the reallocation of funds from another budget.

2. If they don’t use it, they lose it.

Many law firms and employers (not all, but many) have the unwritten policy that if there’s budget money left over at the end of the year, it’s an indication that they didn’t need all that money after all.

The next year, that budget line item would be reduced or cut altogether to reflect what was spent this year.

3. Less spending after October

This really only applies to law firms and typically larger law firms. They don’t like to spend money on what they consider to be non-essential expenses after the end of October. This gives you two things to think about.

If you’re in a law firm, and you know there’s a paralegal training event that’s happening in early January, get it approved and paid for in September or early October if you can. 

If you know there’s a specific training later the next year that’s more expensive than what would be typical, talk to your manager about it before those budgets get finalized so that the funds will be available the following year. 

Now, one other word of caution here. If you’re in a large firm, while those budgets are being calculated and approved in November and December (depending on the firm of course), they’re not usually funded until February. This will make it hard for you to get them to pay for something in January if you wait until January to ask.

It’s different at every firm, but I wanted to give you some of that insight when it comes to asking for them to invest in your paralegal career development. 

Check out these things I learned as a paralegal manager that I wish I knew as a paralegal. 

Preparing your request

Let’s assume the stars have aligned and you’re going to ask for them to pay for some paralegal training.

How do you go about asking?

You’re going to want to start with some cold, hard data so that you will be able to answer any questions that may come up as part of your request.

Questions you’ll want to know the answers to

1. 1. What is the name and a brief summary of the program that you want to attend?
   2. What is it that you expect to learn or take away from that program? In other words, what skills will you be gaining?
   3. What is the cost?
   4. Is there a discount if the firm wants to send more than one of you?
   5. When and how will you access the training? In other words, are you going to have to be out of the office? Or can you take it online? Even if it’s online – will you be taking it during the work day from your work computer or will you be taking it during the evenings and the weekends?
   6. Will it require you to travel? If so, are you asking the employer to pay for that travel? Now sadly, this can be a hard one to get approval for a paralegal. But as much as we’d like to be able to beat up the law firm for this, we really can’t if you think about how expensive travel is nowadays. If the professional development program that you want to attend is out of town and is going to require travel expenses, be sure all your ducks are in a row before you submit a request to attend something that will require them to pay for your travel. Post-covid, almost all live conferences have an option for an online/virtual attendee option.
   7. Are you going to need to take time off to attend? If so, are you wanting to get paid for that time or use your PTO time?
   8. What is the ROI to the employer and to your attorney specifically? What problem is it going to solve for them? Instead of telling them what you’re going to learn, be able to explain how what you are going to learn is going to benefit them. 
   9. What is your overall career development plan?

Do your research and gather resources

Here’s a perfect example. Let’s say you’re a litigation paralegal who has been struggling to stay ahead of deadlines and everything is always a last-minute rush – a mad dash to the finish line. Because of that, there have been some mistakes that you’ve made. 

You know that part of the reason for those last-minute rushes is because the attorney waits until the 11^th hour to even tell you about it and you also know that the attorney is too busy to provide on-the-job training – you know – that stuff you heard about when you were in school? 

So you come across the Litigation Boot Camp that I teach. 

Now you find what you think is a great training program that’s going to show you how to proactively manage your cases that will definitely benefit the attorney. But you’ll need to go a step or two further than that when you’re coming up with the ROI.