MG What a paralegal can hand to an assistant.
The paralegal's day is the firm's operating system. Most of it is typing the same facts into three places. Here is the part an assistant can carry, and the part it should not touch.
Opening a matter
A new client means a conflict check, a contact and a matter in Clio, the intake tasks, the first dates, the engagement email, and filing the correspondence that started it. Five systems, one set of facts. The assistant takes the facts once - who, what, the other side, the attorney, the dates you already know - runs the conflict check and shows you the table, opens the contact and matter (or uses the contact Clio already has), adds your intake steps as tasks, puts the first dates on Clio's calendar and yours, files the intake emails, and drafts the welcome letter for the attorney to review. Every step is shown before it happens and runs only on your yes. Once you have settled your intake checklist, it remembers it and stops asking.
Deadlines, on both calendars, once
You have worked out the dates. The assistant puts each one on Clio's calendar on the matter, on your Outlook calendar tied to the Clio entry so it can never be added twice, and adds a reminder task ahead of it. When you give it an interval, it does the arithmetic in the open - "21 days from September 12 is October 3, a Saturday" - and asks what you want done about the weekend. It does not compute legal deadlines from rules. It does not know what a rule says, whether a Saturday rolls, or what service by mail adds, and it will not pretend to. That knowledge is yours and the attorney's; the typing is the assistant's.
What are we waiting on?
Records from a provider, a signed engagement letter, an adjuster's answer. The assistant reads the requests you sent and the replies that came back, and lists each outstanding item with how long it has waited. Then, one at a time and on your yes: a follow-up email as a reply on your own request, a task on the matter with a date you choose. It never says an item is unanswered as a fact - a fax or a phone call is invisible to it - it says "no reply found in your mailbox since" a date, and you decide.
Before the bill goes out
For the matter and the period, it reads the time entries and flags, as suggestions, the ones a client would not understand ("call", "email"), with better wording proposed from what happened that day. It lists possible missing time. It notes two entries with the same wording on one date. It writes a one-screen note for the attorney. It never changes an entry, never invents a duration, never totals a bill.
A discovery index
A dated, numbered table of the correspondence on a matter: from, to, subject, attachments, filed or not, built from what Clio logs and what the mailbox holds, to paste into a discovery log. What is responsive or privileged is a judgment, and it stays with you.
The part that stays with the paralegal
Every "yes". The assistant proposes, shows, and waits; nothing is written to Clio or sent from your mailbox without you. It signs in as you, so it can see and do only what you can. And it does not read anyone else's mailbox, or Clio's documents, or paper. What it removes is the typing, the re-typing, and the chance that the third copy of a fact is wrong.
A firm chooses "attorney" or "paralegal" when someone joins; every skill is available to both, and a paralegal simply gets these offered first. The guides, and the fourteen-day trial.
Also read: Filing Outlook email to Clio matters, and why it slips and Finding the billable time you forgot to enter. All articles.