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Training someone without a degree means you can pay less (or pay the same and keep them forever). You can always scale up to a seasoned professional later when the budget allows.
Is there time to train? There are also courses on how to be a paralegal. Your local bar may have some on demand. They are usually about a day long.
Make sure he/she creates a SOP as they go so if it doesn’t work out you have the roadmap already for the next person.
The real question is whether his/her direct supervisor is a trainer or not. Training takes time, patients, and acknowledgement that there will be mistakes.
In my first office, most of the assistants were not paralegals. Two were. One was just out of paralegal school (at a non-accredited school) and was not doing well. She went through most of the attorneys without success. I said I would give it a try. I spent time learning her learning style and working with her. She became the best paralegal/support person in the office and everyone wanted her to work for them.
She eventually left to be a paralegal elsewhere and I kept tabs on her. We are friends still and as my own business grows and becomes ready to support a second person, she will be the one I reach out to first.
I’ve also hired seasoned professionals at a prior firm who ended up not knowing how to properly use email. If you are going for a seasoned professional, I recommend going through a placement agency because they will have him/her do testing to make sure the skills are there to hit the ground running.
I was between jobs for awhile in the past and worked through a temp agency for odd jobs. Their focus was on legal assistants and paralegals. They putting me through several tests - including common legal software tests, research tests, grammar tests, and typing WPM. It was very impressive. Ask for the results of tests if you do go that route.
Thank you so much for this thorough response. Very helpful in processing the landscape and potential outcomes of each option. So appreciate your input!
I have done it a couple of times, with mixed results. On two occasions, we have taken someone working as our receptionist and moved them to an assistant role supporting my group. It was a bit of a rocky start training someone for that role from scratch, but it did work initially. The key early on is to get full buy-in from each attorney the trainee will be supporting, and the buy-in needs to include not only being patient with mistakes but a commitment to taking the time to train. Now, the downside I experienced is when we did take young, smart, go-getters from other positions and made them assistants, they usually didn’t stay as assistants for more than a couple of years, precisely because they were smart go-getters with ambition for bigger and better things. Several of our best assistants moved on to paralegal, marketing and other roles that had more financial upside and were more challenging. When you hire someone who has been an assistant for a while, you are more likely to get someone who is satisfied with that role and will stay a while.
Thank you!