The Estrin Report

Paralegal Leads Union Protest of Pilot's Union Employees

Paralegals in a union????  Yep.  According to The Star-Telegram.com, protesters who marched Monday morning in Ft. Worth weren't airline employees, and airline management wasn't the target. This demonstration was conducted by employees of the Allied Pilots Association, and the managers being criticized are union pilots.

The Allied Pilots Staff Employee Association represents 23 employees who work for the pilots union, which is headquartered in Fort Worth near American Airlines offices. Members include paralegals, graphic artists, administrative assistants and other hourly employees.

Spokeswoman Kathy Schroeder, a paralegal, said the union has been working without a contract for nearly 300 days. She says the labor group agreed to concessions in their last contract, which was inked five years ago. She said the last contract, signed five years ago, included no raises, although the APA eventually did give pay increases that totaled about 4 percent over the past five years. The contract expired nearly 300 days ago, Schroeder said, but little progress has been made at the negotiating table.

"Right now, what we want is to restore our contract to what it was before concessions," said Kathy Schroeder, a paralegal for the APA and a spokesman for the staff union. "Right now the APA is refusing to restore any of the items we lost."

Go get 'em Kathy!  Paralegal rises to the challenge.  But what if paralegals at law firms had union contracts?  Would that ensure overtime pay; better benefits; a union rep to represent their grievances, a credit union, a labor hall to go to when they are laid off, contracts guaranteeing raises. a pension plan and more?  It's a thought. 

Let's Get This to the Paralegal - In India

Outsourcing to paralegals and attorneys in India remains a booming business.  In fact, Dupont, the model for progressive paralegal departments, outsourced so much work to LPOs (Legal Process Outsourcing) last year, that it saved the company over $500,000 in legal fees.

In an article in Time magazine this morning, Tom Sager, chief litigation counsel for Dupont, said, "There's been some internal resistance, and from the outside too, about working with providers thousands of miles away. But geographic separation is now a fact of life." Dupont outsources to Chicago's RR Donnelley, which uses facilities in India and the Philippines to review documents for the chemical giant.

Changes in litigation procedures are boosting momentum in the LPO trade. Amendments to federal rules require parties to share electronic documents, such as e-mail and Microsoft Office files.

That typically means both sides must review thousands of documents to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of confidential information to the other party. The service costs about $1 per page in India but can range from $7 to $10 per page in the U.S. "Some clients don't want to spend that much, especially if they don't even know how much their damages could be," says Conrad Jacoby, owner of efficientEDD, a legal-technology consultancy in Dunn Loring, Va and a frequent Paralegal SuperConference speaker.

What does this mean for paralegals?  The use of LPOs will probably continue to grow.  This is a clear trend of delegating to the lowest, most cost-efficient level.  It doesn't mean that the use of paralegals in the U.S. will be less frequent.  It does, however, mean that the type of work paralegals will be asked to do will change to more sophisticated assignments previously performed by associates.  Paralegals, it's time to get on that continuing legal education bandwagon and study-up!

Paralegal Positions in Foreclosures Go Wild

Talk about capitalizing on someone else's misery!  According an article in the The Tampa Tribune, law firms are scrambling for more staff, particularly paralegals, in an effort to meet the wave of foreclosures in hard-hit areas of the country.

One Tampa law firm, Florida Default Law Group, filed more than 400 foreclosure lawsuits in Hillsborough County in February alone, according to a Tampa Tribune review of Hillsborough County Clerk of Court records.

Foreclosure firms have ramped up their hiring. Jim Albertelli of Tampa-based Albertelli Law, estimated that the biggest firms in Florida have grown to as many as 200 clerks, paralegals, lawyers and other staff, based on the wildly increasing number of foreclosures coming across the transom.

Apparently, law firm efficiency has been tested by the increase in volume.  Outsourcing firms have risen to assist law firms, and I would assume that this causes even more positions to be created.

Typically, clerks, paralegals and other support staff do much of the legwork for foreclosures, such as setting the court hearings and, if necessary, coordinating a foreclosure sale of the property. A small number of lawyers typically oversee them.

For example, Albertelli Law of Tampa has about 30 people working on foreclosures in Tampa. Five of them are lawyers, though they get help from lawyers in the firm's other offices in Florida. In February, Albertelli filed 61 foreclosure lawsuits in Hillsborough County Circuit Court, according to clerk of court records.

Albertelli said he's hoping to increase staffing in his Tampa office on Harbour Island to 100 employees in the next several months to deal with his huge new caseload. Given the size of the foreclosure crisis in the country, I really can't think of a better classic example of "I've got good news and I've got bad news."