Reinventing the Practice of Law
William P. Allison
Attorney at Law
For the first time the State Bar through the Texas Board of Legal Specialization is going to offer a specialization exam in criminal law for legal assistants. That's right, legal assistants, you know, paralegals. But listen to this. The reason this new area of legal assistant specialization is being offered is because lawyers voted for it. Not legal assistants, but lawyers. What is going on?
It's simple, there's a need. In fact, the need for legal assistants who specialize in criminal law begins to make wonderful sense when you reflect on how we practice law. How many big criminal law firms can you name? How about none. The big civil firms already have specialized support staff in place, but they don't do what we do. We tend to be mavericks or to hunt in small packs. We are the firemen and EMT's of the legal profession. When the fire alarm sounds, you have to leave what you are doing (like sleeping in the middle of the night) and answer the call. That's why a legal assistant, specialized in criminal law and well placed, can make a world of difference in your practice. My guess is that few of the lawyers' votes for this specialization came from prosecutors' offices where unrecognized legal assistants specializing in criminal law are already on the job. But I suspect that some push came from the rug lawyers who, when that occasional call from the federal court comes appointing them to a criminal case, almost have apoplexy. There was also support from the general practitioners who routinely handle criminal cases along with all other types of legal matters. Many of these lawyers, who are my friends, like criminal law the least because they don't have the time to master the area and the stakes are so high. And finally, there are those of us who do nothing but criminal law, you know, the ones who know it all. We, more than any other group of lawyers, need board certified legal assistants working with us. What can we do for each other?
It makes no difference whether you run a boutique law office or you have a volume practice, you can greatly benefit from a trained legal assistant if you just take the time to consider how your office works, or better, how it doesn't work. In talking with Elizabeth Elliott, who works as a legal assistant in the Austin office of David Sheppard, we outlined just a few areas where the trained legal assistant makes a difference.
First on the list has to be client communications. The lack of returned phone calls gives rise to more grievances than anything else. A few of us are pretty good at this, but from the client's point of view, none of us measures up. Get your legal assistant involved in your cases from the outset. Introduce him or her and stress the board certification. Build your legal assistant up as the most important person in the office. Put your board certified legal assistant on your letterhead. This gives your assistant that higher professional profile that will make your clients feel confident dealing with him or her. If you had good help in the communications area, you could do more with your practice.
The course of study for certification in criminal law should include interviewing and investigating skills. Fact finding is very time consuming but is usually the single most important component of your case. If you discover a critical fact, that fact may be useless in trial since you cannot switch roles from lawyer to witness to introduce the needed information. So interviewing and investigating are solid areas where each of us can use trained help. Elizabeth, for instance, working with David Sheppard, has learned that the source of a witnesses' knowledge makes all the difference in the world in terms of its admissibility at trial. This ability to spot hearsay and root out the source of the information should be a basic skill of a board certified legal assistant for a criminal lawyer. Not only does Elizabeth warn David of the potential evidentiary problem, she knows to go to the next level and look for the source of admissible evidence. Now that's help worth paying for.
The third area we talked about is legal research. Particularly in this age of computer based legal research, a legal assistant specializing in criminal law can be invaluable. Many of us went to law school during the Jurassic age and had to deal with books. Things have changed and a well trained legal assistant could catapult you into the present in terms of finding the law. You, however, are still going to be responsible for reading the found materials and making the necessary interpretations.
Finally there are the pretrial motions, keeping up with your docket, getting you organized with a tickler system, establishing and keeping good relationships with the people at the courthouses, and on and on.
One thing I hope for is creative enterprise on the part of the legal assistants. We should see legal assistants setting up their own practices where they contract out their services to several lawyers. We might see several legal assistants, for instance, specialists in family and criminal law, forming such associations. You as a practitioner may not be able to afford a full time legal assistant, but you might desperately need someone on a part time basis. This is the type of reinvention of the practice of law that is just around the corner and we need to be ready and willing to make the most of it.
This new area of certification is going to be a win/win situation for those of us interested enough in making these relationships work. The bottom line in all of this is, of course, the bottom line. How can you and a board certified legal assistant work together to make your practice more lucrative and less stressful for both of you. That is where the invention is going to come in. The new divisions of labor in the office, the ability to delegate more responsibility to a well trained professional and the ability to get more work done and provide a better service while reducing the stress level are goals worth working toward. All of us who are serious about the practice of criminal law need to back this program 100%. We need to start the dialogue right now with our support staffs or with others interested in the area. We need to find out all we can about criminal specialization for legal assistants.
Editor's Note:
This article originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of Voice for the Defense, a monthly magazine of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyer's Association.
TEXAS PARALEGAL JOURNAL
Winter 1996
©1996 Legal Assistants Division, State Bar of Texas