Paralegal

1What you'd actually do

• Drafting and amending documents from templates or precedents — witness statements, contracts, leases, court forms, letters before action — which a supervising solicitor then reviews and signs off
• Running the administrative spine of live cases: opening files, chasing missing documents, diarising deadlines, filing at court (increasingly through online portals), and making sure limitation dates and court directions are not missed
• Talking to clients directly — taking initial instructions, updating them on progress, explaining what a document means or what happens next, and handling the calls where nothing has moved and the client is anxious
• Legal research using subscription databases (the main ones are Westlaw, LexisNexis and Practical Law) to find case law, statute or precedent documents, then summarising the answer in a note for a fee-earner
• Bundling and disclosure work — assembling, paginating and indexing the sets of documents used in court hearings or arbitrations, and reviewing large volumes of documents for relevance or privilege in litigation
• Corresponding with the other side, the court, counsel's clerks, medical experts, estate agents, Land Registry or Companies House depending on the practice area
• Recording time in six-minute units if the employer is a firm that bills clients hourly, and often working to a personal billing or case-volume target

2How graduates get in

• Direct application to advertised paralegal vacancies after a law degree (LLB) or a non-law degree plus a conversion course. This is by far the most common route and most paralegal jobs are recruited this way — rolling, ad hoc, no fixed graduate-scheme season.
• Applying as a deliberate stepping stone to qualification: many graduates who want a training contract or the SQE route take a paralegal job first to build experience and, in some cases, to have the employer sponsor or fund their qualification. This is very common in commercial and City firms, where paralegal pools are a recognised feeder for trainee intakes at some firms — though a paralegal job is never a guarantee of a training contract.
• Through the qualifying work experience (QWE) route under the Solicitors Qualifying Examination. Since the SQE replaced the LPC/training contract as the default qualification route, paralegal work can count towards the two years of QWE needed to qualify as a solicitor, provided it is signed off by a solicitor or COLP (the firm's compliance officer). Whether an employer will sign QWE varies enormously — ask before accepting.
• Volume or high-street work as a first job: personal injury, clinical negligence, debt recovery, residential conveyancing, immigration and family firms hire large numbers of paralegals and are often more open to candidates without a top-tier academic record. Case-handler and claims-handler roles at insurers and legal services businesses are functionally similar.
• In-house and public sector: legal teams in government departments, local authorities, the NHS, universities, banks and large companies hire paralegals directly. The Government Legal Profession and local authority legal teams recruit at this level, though these roles are less numerous than private practice ones.
• Via a paralegal apprenticeship or a CILEX route — less common for graduates, since these are designed as non-degree entry paths, but graduates sometimes join CILEX (the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives) alongside paralegal work as an alternative qualification route to becoming a lawyer.

3What employers ask for

• A law degree or a non-law degree plus a conversion course (the PGDL, formerly the GDL) is the norm, but it genuinely varies: some employers, particularly in volume litigation, conveyancing and claims work, will hire any graduate or even non-graduates with relevant admin experience and train them on the process.
• Degree classification requirements vary sharply by sector. Large commercial firms often screen for a 2:1 or above and may have A-level requirements too; high-street firms, in-house teams and smaller practices are frequently more flexible and weight experience and interview performance more heavily.
• Some prior legal exposure is often expected — a vacation scheme, a placement, university law clinic or pro bono work, Citizens Advice volunteering, court marshalling, or an administrative job in a legal setting. Employers hiring for volume roles care less about this than commercial firms do.
• The SQE (Solicitors Qualifying Examination) is not required to be a paralegal, and neither is the older LPC. Some candidates have passed SQE1 already, which can help for roles where the employer is looking at future trainees, but plenty of paralegals have taken no professional exams at all.
• Practical competence with case management systems, document management and Microsoft Office — and increasingly with court and Land Registry online portals. Employers often test attention to detail at interview with a proofreading or drafting exercise.
• For some roles, security clearance (public sector), a driving licence (if attending clients or courts), or fluency in a second language (immigration, international private client) can be a genuine requirement.

4Skills that matter

5Where it leads

1. Paralegal to senior or supervising paralegal — taking your own caseload with lighter supervision, training juniors, and in some firms handling matters end to end. Timelines vary widely; some people reach this in a couple of years, others stay at paralegal level by choice for much longer.

2. Paralegal to trainee solicitor or to SQE qualification. Under the SQE route this usually means accumulating two years of qualifying work experience, passing SQE1 and SQE2, and meeting the SRA's character and suitability requirements. Some employers fund the exams and formally count your paralegal time as QWE; many do not, and you fund and sit them yourself. Do not assume the employer will do either — check at offer stage.

3. Sideways into a specialism. Paralegals often become genuinely expert in one narrow area — Land Registry practice, immigration applications, costs, court of protection — and that expertise becomes the career in its own right, sometimes at higher pay than a junior qualified lawyer in a different field.

4. Out of private practice into in-house legal operations, compliance, contract management, risk, company secretarial work, or roles at regulators and government legal teams, where paralegal experience transfers well and hours are often more predictable.

5. Into legal technology and eDiscovery — document review and case management experience is directly relevant to legal tech vendors, litigation support providers and law firm innovation teams.

6Where this varies

"Paralegal" covers wildly different jobs. At a large commercial or City firm it may mean document review on a big piece of litigation or transaction support, often on a fixed-term contract tied to one matter, with long hours and good pay. At a high-street firm or a volume claims business it usually means running many small files yourself with targets attached. In-house at a company, in local government or in a charity, it tends to mean contract review, policy support and being a generalist to the business, with more predictable hours. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate legal systems and separate qualification routes (the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice and traineeship in Scotland, for example), so the SQE and QWE framework described here applies to England and Wales. Job security also varies: some paralegal posts are permanent career roles, others are explicitly temporary matter-specific hires.