How to select a paralegal?

The solicitor’s working for a client gets a boost when one delivers quality work. It depends only upon three major factors viz - Solicitors, paralegal and coordination between the two. It will not be an irony to say that a solicitor is the title page where as a paralegal draws the content of the book. This is ofcourse as per the advice and supervision of the solicitor. The sole purpose of saying this is to highlight the importance of paralegals in a law firm.

It is evidently a very important task to select a paralegal. A paralegal should posses atleast three important characteristics which can be termed as:

a. Requisite Qualification
b. Key skills
c. Cohesion & communication skill with the solicitors.

Before a paralegal is sought to be selected, one must understand their own requirement. One needs to determine the different responsibilities which are to be carried out by the paralegal and accordingly the required skills should be fixed.

Let’s say, if I am looking for a paralegal to support my work, then it is clear that I should fix the key skills matching up my specialization. Once the requisites of the paralegal are fixed, my second task would be to contact the recruitment consultants or references to shortlist the prospective paralegals. There are a couple of recruitment consultants located in UK viz –

Parkhouse Bell Ltd, Executive Stand-By, Advanced Resource Managers Ltd, Ethical Recruitment – Financial, BLT (Beaumont Leslie Thomas, Heidrick & Struggles

The recruitment consultants take the responsibility right from searching for the correct candidate to their training. One can even go to the extent of creating a checklist for the selection / appointment of the paralegals. I shall take this up in my next article.