The Role of Paralegals in Legal Document Drafting

A paralegal is a legal assistant that gets hired by an attorney and works in the same capacity as an attorney, but is not licensed to practice law. Paralegals provide many types of legal support and disclosure to help lawyers do their jobs more effectively.

Why is this interesting to you, a student? Because paralegals work in many areas of law and help lawyers draft legal documents within the framework and confines of the law. If you have been a school-aged child at some point in your life, you have derived some key skills that are used by paralegals:

Lawyers can hire paralegals to draft letters, motions, pleadings, wills, contracts, documents, agreements, and much more. These tasks are only completed under the supervision of and to the specifications of an attorney. This is because paralegals cannot practice law and may not advise clients or potential clients on legal matters. What do these documents have in common? They are all legal documents!

Paralegals need creativity for the most basic of legal documents. Beyond the tasks that require attention to detail and strict supervision by an attorney, paralegals are involved in the conceptualization and organization of legal documents. For example, something as simple as a letter might have a different format than a motion or a will. Being able to have the creativity to be able to recognize that and then organize the document into the proper format is a high-level skill that many students possess.

There are laws and statutes that dictate the manner in which legal documents must be formatted. Formatting refers to how the text, lines, and page numbers will appear on the printed page. Some documents, unlike what you learned in school, simply cannot be saved and converted into another application like Word, but are to be completed with specific software tools. Regardless of the electronic format utilized, many of the same rules apply:

In this regard, a paralegal has a high level of organizational and detail vision that gives them a competitive edge over others. Some formats are mandated by state statute or legislation including motion calendars, petitions for discovery, and pleadings. Others are requested by the attorney or the court to create a form or document that is clear, concise, and readily available to be revised for use in future applications.

Not all legal documents are required to be formal or detailed, and those that are are not held fast to a form. For example, a residential real estate contract and a commercial real estate contract are both contracts that contain many of the same provisions which transfer property and include the purchase price and terms. Each one of them can be completely unique and specific to the needs of the parties, circumstance, and property. The only requirement is that a contract contains the establishment of a legal relationship between two (or more) parties that contains the contact information, an offer, acceptance, consideration, and an explanation of the legal requirements that will satisfy the contract. Paralegals are capable of completing these forms and documents.

As a paralegal, you have the opportunity to use your creative abilities to draft many types of legal documents, depending on the need. You can utilize many of the skills you acquire in school and from extracurricular activities in just about any position that you have, even if you’re helping someone enroll their child in kindergarten! According to the in depth guide on the ability of paralegals to draft legal documents, yes, they can handle the most basic of tasks and more complex projects.