Paralegal News: Big Dilemmas & Tiny Projects

Every month, every week, even every day new content surfaces with helpful tips and tricks to support growth in your paralegal career. You’re busy taking care of the demanding tasks of organizing a case, chasing down transcripts, and scheduling important events to ensure the outcome your client deserves.  Finding the time in your busy day to stay current on news and legal insights is daunting.

You honestly just don’t have time.

So, we’re here to help you. Every month, we’ll compile some of our favorite articles to help guide you to be a better, more informed paralegal.

Read on.

Getting Comfortable with Technology Assisted Review

Technology Assisted Review (TAR) has been available as a tool in the e-discovery marketplace for roughly a decade. In those early days, some attorneys viewed TAR as simply a new label for existing smart review strategies. Other attorneys (particularly with risk-averse clients) were slow to embrace a review method that did not include a set of human eyes on every document before it went to government or opposing counsel in a production.

How the Tiny Extra Project Eats Your Practice

Once you start taking on extra projects at a discount to fill the downtime, the dominoes start to fall. Unprofitable projects breed other unprofitable projects. Then we end up with more unprofitable work than we can handle, and our clients start referring even more unprofitable business.

The Internet of Things Means a Big Dilemma for Big Law Discovery

Thermostats, refrigerators, motor vehicles, heart monitors and manufacturing equipment—these were not the devices that legal technologists likely originally had in mind when assembling e-discovery software. Yet as a new era of internet-connected devices becomes more integral to our social and professional existence, it is these creations that, because they often transmit data that isn’t in a textual format, will likely exacerbate big data challenges for years to come.

How to Fire an Associate Attorney

As your solo or small firm grows, you will probably consider hiring an associate attorney to help with the work. And if some day there just isn’t as much business as you’d hoped there would be or the hire is not working out, there’s a chance you’ll need to terminate the employment. Here are some things to consider if you are thinking you need to fire an associate attorney.

The Ever Evolving Law Firm Fee Structure – Guest Lecture with Jared Correia

In the late 90′s and definitely into the 21st century, the law firm fee structure is morphing and changing under tremendous pressure from clients and the economy.  But where do new solos (and some not-so-new) lawyers go to learn about the what fee structures are out there?

Defending Against Ransomware Attacks

Cybercriminals tend to target industries that are the most dependent on the timely availability and strict confidentiality of their business-critical information. This means law firms are at high risk, since they are often moving data to cloud-based case management, record searching, research and communication platforms. With both on-site and cloud-based data storage, it’s increasingly important to protect clients’ sensitive case information against these threats.