The Role of a Corporate Paralegal

What is a Corporate Paralegal?

Unlike a standard paralegal, a corporate paralegal works in-house for an organization rather than for a law firm. They assist other in-house lawyers in preparing and filing company documents, maintaining corporate records, and handling other legal matters related to the company. While corporate paralegals do not practice law, they still play an essential role in corporate law matters as they help drive many aspects of corporate legal transactions.

What are the key responsibilities for a corporate paralegal? 

Corporate paralegals are responsible for various administrative tasks within the legal department that include: 

• Legal Research: Researching and staying up-to-date on laws, regulations, and legislation is an important part for the role of corporate paralegals to ensure that the company remains compliant with application laws. 
• Intake & Triage: In some departments, paralegals must manually sort through legal requests and direct each request to the appropriate lawyer to bring it to resolution. 
• Record Keeping: Corporate paralegals are responsible for drafting and maintaining organizational documents and filings annual required reports.
• Litigation Support: In this role, assisting attorneys with litigation matters, including responding to document requests, complaints, and discovery is required. 
• Contract Management: Drafting, reviewing, and updating various contracts such as employment agreements, non-disclosure agreements, vendor contracts, and partnership agreements are all vital to the role of a corporate paralegal. 

‍Challenges for a Corporate Paralegal

While the role of a corporate paralegal is paramount to the success of the legal team, they encounter a number of obstacles in their daily work, including: 

• Adaptability & Multitasking: Corporate paralegals must often support multiple attorneys and departments simultaneously, requiring them to adapt to constantly changing priorities, deadlines, and work styles. 
• Broad Legal Knowledge: Since corporate law covers a wide range of areas like contracts, mergers and acquisitions, compliance, intellectual property, and more, they need to have a broad understanding of multiple areas to effectively support the attorneys they work with. 
• Confidentiality & Ethics: Handling sensitive corporate information requires corporate paralegals to adhere to company confidentiality and ethical standards. It is their duty to remain vigilant in protecting company data and avoiding conflicts of interest. 
• Technology Proficiency: As legal technology becomes more prominent in the day-to-day tasks of the legal department, corporate paralegals must learn how to use these tools to thrive in a digital environment. 

Goals for a Corporate Paralegal

Corporate paralegals face numerous challenges, yet their primary goal is to provide quality support to attorneys, enabling better service to the business. To achieve this, they must continuously learn and adapt to the ever-changing legal landscape and technological advancements, expanding their knowledge and skills. Additionally, improving communication skills with attorneys, clients, and other stakeholders is essential, as is demonstrating successful collaboration and project management. By focusing on these areas, corporate paralegals can grow their responsibilities and advance their careers, taking on more senior roles as they progress.

How can legal technology help corporate paralegals advance in their role? 

Legal technology can help corporate paralegals reduce the time they spend on manual tasks, minimize errors, and ensure that documents are easily accessible, allowing paralegals to better manage their workloads. Paralegals can leverage software in a number of ways to help them advance their careers when utilized correctly. 

Legal workflow solutions can be paramount to helping corporate paralegals advance in their role. By building and automating workflows across the legal department, paralegals can then free up their time to focus on building the necessary skills to help them advance in their legal careers. Automation of routine tasks, such as document review, filing, and compliance checks, allows paralegals to concentrate on their higher-level responsibilities.

Matter management systems for in-house counsel also play a crucial role in streamlining the intake and triage process, as well as providing litigation support. These systems serve as centralized repositories for storing and organizing case-related documents, including important company-sensitive materials such as briefs, discovery materials, and more. By acting as a centralized repository, matter management systems enable legal professionals to easily access and retrieve critical information, facilitating the analysis of important documents for lawyers. This centralized access reduces the time spent searching for documents and ensures that all team members are working with the most up-to-date information.