Cleary and paralegals

[Phoebe-Lou]

I just saw on the lawyer how Cleary is making all paralegals redundant. I was wondering what the impact of this would be both at Cleary's and at other law firms? Is it likely that will start a trend?

As a secondary point, I was wondering if someone could tell me what being a paralegal entails, and how a firm could make the whole program redundant?

 

[Jaysen]

I just saw on the lawyer how Cleary is making all paralegals redundant. I was wondering what the impact of this would be both at Cleary's and at other law firms? Is it likely that will start a trend?

As a secondary point, I was wondering if someone could tell me what being a paralegal entails, and how a firm could make the whole program redundant?

I can't say I have much knowledge about this, but I'm not convinced it has much of a wider impact outside Cleary. It looks like the firm has been going through some big challenges recently (with many lawyers leaving), which may have factored into their desire to cut costs. The work will be passed on to others and it'll save some money, although by how much I'm not sure as Cleary only had three paralegals. That's quite different to a large UK firm shedding its paralegal programme.

I worked with a paralegal only for a very short amount of time, so I'll leave your last question to the paralegals on here who can give you a better idea of what they do.