Day in the Life of a Paralegal: Three Real Days

Alarm. Hit snooze. Hit snooze again. Got up at 7:24. Coffee from the Chemex because the Keurig in the office makes coffee that tastes like warm disappointment and I refuse to start my day with it. My boyfriend, Nathan, is still asleep. He works in tech and his first meeting is at 10. I choose not to think about this.

At my desk. The office is half-empty because two of the corporate attorneys are at a client's office for a board meeting. My attorney, Steven Pak, is here. Steven is 41, a sixth-year partner, handles M&A and corporate governance for mid-market companies. He's already sent me three emails. The first, sent at 6:58 AM, asks me to pull the closing checklist for the Delano acquisition. The second, sent at 7:14 AM, asks me to check whether the good standing certificate for Delano's Delaware subsidiary has been ordered. The third, sent at 7:22 AM, says "never mind on the good standing, I found it." Steven sends a lot of "never mind" emails. I've started a mental tally. We're at 247 for the year.

Opened the closing checklist for the Delano deal. This is a $14 million acquisition of a specialty packaging company by a private equity-backed platform. The closing is scheduled for next Friday. The checklist has 62 items on it. Forty-one are marked complete. Twenty-one are still open. My job between now and Friday is to make sure all 62 are green. Seven of the open items are signature pages that we're waiting on from the seller's counsel. Three are third-party consents. Two are lien releases. The rest are documents I need to prepare or finalize.

Emailed opposing counsel, a paralegal named Margot at a firm in Philadelphia, about the seven outstanding signature pages. Margot and I have been going back and forth on this deal for three weeks. She's organized and responsive, which is not always the case with opposing paralegals. Some of them take 48 hours to respond to a simple email. Margot usually responds within two hours. She replied at 9:22 saying five of the seven signature pages were scanned and uploading to the data room now. The other two need their client's COO, who is traveling and unreachable until Thursday. I put a note in the checklist: "2 sig pages pending, COO ETA Thursday." I'll check again Thursday morning. If they're not in by Thursday at 3 PM, I'll escalate to Steven.

Spent 40 minutes looking for a signature page that Steven said was missing from the officer's certificate. It was not missing. It was in version 3 of the closing checklist. We're on version 5. Version 3 had a different exhibit structure, and the signature page was attached to Exhibit C instead of Exhibit D, which is where it should be in the current version. I found it by opening every prior version of the checklist until the signature page appeared. Sent it to Steven with a note that said, "Found it, was in v3 under Exhibit C." He replied, "Thx." Forty minutes of my morning for three characters of acknowledgment. This is the job.

Started preparing the secretary's certificate for the buyer entity. This is a document that certifies the company's articles of incorporation, bylaws, and board resolutions authorizing the acquisition. I have a template that I've adapted for this deal. Pulled the articles from the Delaware Division of Corporations website, confirmed the registered agent information, and copied the board resolution that Steven drafted last week into the certificate. Proofread twice. Sent to Steven for review.

A different attorney, Vanessa Kim, stopped by my desk to ask if I could help with a small entity formation. A client wants to set up an LLC in Massachusetts. Vanessa is a second-year associate and she's been handling some of the smaller corporate matters on her own. She needs me to file the Certificate of Organization with the Secretary of the Commonwealth. I've done this about 50 times. It takes 20 minutes if everything is straightforward. I asked Vanessa for the member names, the registered agent, and the purpose clause. She had two of the three. The purpose clause, she said, "I'll get back to you." I gave her until 3 PM because the filing can go out tomorrow morning. She said, "You're a lifesaver." I'm not. I'm a paralegal who has filed 50 LLCs. But I appreciate the sentiment.

Lunch at my desk. Leftover pad kra pao from last night. Ate it while reading the three lien search results that came in for the Delano deal. Two were clean. One showed a UCC financing statement filed by a bank in 2021 for a line of credit. The lien needs to be released before closing. I drafted an email to the seller's counsel asking for the UCC-3 termination statement and copied Steven. This is the kind of thing that can hold up a closing if you don't catch it early. I caught it 9 days before closing. That's comfortable. Two days before closing, it would be a crisis.

Steven called me into his office to review the closing checklist together. We went through all 62 items. He made notes on four of them. One item, a third-party consent from a vendor, he said "I'll handle that call directly." Which means the vendor is being difficult and it requires partner-level persuasion. Another item, the bring-down certificate, he asked me to prepare a first draft. That's a document certifying that the seller's representations and warranties are still true as of the closing date. I have a template. I'll adapt it tonight or first thing tomorrow. The meeting took 25 minutes. Steven said "we're in good shape" three times during the meeting, which in Steven-speak means he's nervous and wants to believe we're in good shape.

Vanessa came back with the purpose clause. "Any and all lawful business." Classic catch-all. I prepared the Certificate of Organization, attached it to the online filing portal, and submitted it. Filing fee: $500. Charged to the client's matter number. Massachusetts usually processes these in 3 to 5 business days. I calendared a follow-up for next Wednesday to check the status.

Spent the last hour organizing the data room for the Delano deal. The data room is a virtual folder structure where all deal documents are stored. Both sides have access. There are 14 folders with about 340 documents. I renamed three documents that had been uploaded with generic filenames like "Document1.pdf" and moved two others that were in the wrong folders. This is housekeeping. Nobody thanks you for it. But when opposing counsel can't find a document because it's named "Document1.pdf" instead of "Delano_Officer_Certificate_FINAL.pdf," the call comes to me.

Updated my checklist, sent Steven a summary email with today's progress, and left. Walked to the T at Back Bay station. Train was delayed 8 minutes. Got home at 6:05. Nathan had made pasta. I told him about the 40-minute signature page hunt. He said, "That's insane." I said, "That's Wednesday."

Dropped my daughter, Sadie, at school. She's in fourth grade at a charter school in Tempe. The drop-off line takes 12 minutes if you get there before 7:45 and 25 minutes if you don't. I got there at 7:38. Small victories. Sadie told me she needs poster board for a project due Monday. I typed "poster board" into the notes app on my phone, which currently has 34 items on it, roughly split between work reminders and things Sadie needs.

At the office. Our firm is on the second floor of a strip mall on Scottsdale Road, between a sandwich shop and a UPS Store. The elevator makes a sound that the landlord has been "looking into" since 2023. My desk is in a shared space with our receptionist, Tracy. The three attorneys, Diane, Navid, and Ruth, have offices with doors. I do not. This matters more than people think when you're on the phone with a crying client and the receptionist is scheduling a consultation six feet away.

Checked the calendar. Three things today: a client intake at 10 AM, a motion to compel that needs to go out before 5, and a return call to a client named Patti who left a voicemail at 7:52 AM that said, "Gordon, it's Patti, please call me, he's doing it again." Patti is going through a divorce. Her ex-husband, per the temporary orders, is supposed to pick up their two kids every other Friday at 5 PM from Patti's house. Last weekend he showed up at 4:15 PM without notice, rang the doorbell for five minutes, and then called Patti's mother to complain that Patti was "withholding the children." The children were at swim practice. Nobody was withholding anyone. I will call Patti back first because her voicemail sounded like she hadn't slept.

Called Patti. The "it again" was that her ex sent her a text at 11 PM last night saying he was going to file for full custody because she "can't even answer the door on time." Patti wanted to know if he could do that. I told her: technically anyone can file anything, but a single instance of not being home at 4:15 when pickup is at 5 does not constitute grounds for a custody modification. I told her to screenshot the text and email it to me. I told her to respond to the text with one sentence: "Pickup per the court order is at 5 PM on Fridays." Nothing else. Do not engage with the accusation. Do not explain where the kids were. Just restate the order. Patti said, "I want to tell him off." I said, "I know. Don't." She laughed for the first time in the call. I spent 18 minutes on the phone with her. Diane, the lead attorney on Patti's case, was in a hearing. I'll brief her when she gets back.

New client intake. A woman named Sonya, mid-30s, considering filing for divorce. Navid, the attorney, conducted the consultation. I sat in and took notes. The notes are important because the client often says things in the initial meeting that become relevant later and the attorney doesn't always catch everything while they're asking questions and evaluating the case. Sonya described the marriage, the assets (house, two cars, a small retirement account, and a joint checking account with about $8,000), and the issues (infidelity, financial control, he changed the passwords on the bank accounts in January). Navid asked good questions. I wrote 4 pages of notes in 45 minutes. After Sonya left, Navid asked me to start a file, run a conflict check, and draft the initial retainer agreement. I had the retainer agreement templated and ready by 11:30.

Diane came back from her hearing. I briefed her on Patti's call. She reviewed the text screenshot I'd received from Patti and said, "He's building a narrative for a custody motion. We need to document everything." She asked me to start a timeline of every incident since the temporary orders were entered. I pulled up the file and started going through the notes. I've been keeping contemporaneous records of every call Patti has made to the office, every text she's forwarded, and every incident she's reported. The timeline, when I laid it out, showed 11 incidents in four months, all initiated by the ex-husband, all minor, all designed to create a paper trail of Patti being "uncooperative." Diane looked at the timeline and said, "Good. This is exactly what we need if he files." I spent about 45 minutes compiling it.

Lunch. Turkey sandwich from the sandwich shop downstairs. Ate at my desk because the motion to compel is due today. Tracy asked if I wanted to eat in the break room. The break room is a counter with a microwave and a mini-fridge that has been making a noise since February. I chose the desk.

Worked on the motion to compel. This is for a different case, a divorce where the husband's attorney has not responded to our discovery requests for 47 days. The deadline to respond was 33 days. Ruth, the attorney on this case, asked me to draft the motion. I pulled the template, inserted the case-specific facts (date discovery was served, date response was due, the two follow-up emails I sent to opposing counsel that were not returned), and attached the proof of service. The motion asks the court to order the husband to respond within 10 days and to pay our attorney's fees for having to file the motion. Ruth reviewed my draft, changed one sentence, and signed it. I formatted the final version, converted it to PDF, and e-filed it through the Maricopa County Superior Court electronic filing system at 4:47 PM. Filing fee: $0 because it's a motion, not an initiating document. The confirmation number came back at 4:49 PM. I saved it to the file.

Returned two more client calls, updated three case files, and left at 5:25. Picked up Sadie from after-care. She asked if I'd gotten the poster board. I had not. We stopped at Target. She picked neon green. I did not argue. At home, my wife, Carla, had leftover enchiladas in the oven. I told her about Patti's call. Not the details, just "tough day for a client." Carla is a dental hygienist and she said, "I had a patient cry in the chair today because she can't afford the crown she needs." We sat with that for a minute. Then Sadie showed us a drawing of a horse she'd made in art class and the minute was over.

At the office before anyone else. I like the quiet before the phones start. Made coffee in the Bunn machine that has been in the kitchen since I started here in 2004. The Bunn outlasted two managing partners, a renovation, and a firm name change. I have considered writing it a thank-you card. Opened my closing calendar. Today I have two closings: a residential purchase at 10 AM and a refinance at 2 PM. The residential purchase is a couple buying their first home in Garner for $412,000. The refinance is a homeowner in North Raleigh pulling equity to renovate his kitchen.

Started prepping for the 10 AM closing. Pulled the title search I ordered last week from the title company, First Southeastern Title. The title is clean, meaning there are no outstanding liens, judgments, or encumbrances that would prevent the sale. There's one item: a deed of trust from the seller's original mortgage that needs to be paid off at closing. The payoff letter from the seller's lender came in yesterday at $187,422.16 with a per diem of $34.67. The payoff is good through April 5th. Today is March 25th. That gives us 11 days of cushion, which is plenty.

Prepared the closing disclosure, which is the document that shows every dollar involved in the transaction. Purchase price: $412,000. Buyer's down payment: $41,200 (10%). Loan amount: $370,800. Seller's payoff: $187,422.16. Real estate commissions: $22,660 (buyer's agent $12,360, listing agent $10,300). Title insurance premium: $1,890. Recording fees: $62. Transfer tax: $824. Attorney's fee: $750. Eighteen other line items. The total cash the buyer needs to bring to closing: $52,847.33. I've prepared hundreds of these. The math is always the math. But every number represents a decision someone made about their life, and if the total is wrong by even one dollar, the lender won't fund and the closing doesn't happen. I check the CD three times. It balances.

Called the buyer's lender, a loan officer named Dennis at a regional bank, to confirm the wire. The lender wires the loan proceeds to our trust account and we disburse from there. Dennis confirmed the wire would go out at 9:30 AM. I called the buyer's real estate agent, a woman named Terri, to confirm the buyers are on track for 10 AM and have their certified check for the balance. Terri confirmed. I called the listing agent to confirm the sellers will be present or have signed documents in advance. The sellers signed yesterday at our Cary office, so their documents are already in the file. Four calls in 15 minutes. This is the coordination layer that nobody sees but everything depends on.

The buyers arrived. A couple in their early 30s. He's an engineer at a pharma company in RTP. She teaches kindergarten. They were nervous and excited. I've seen this combination about 3,000 times and it never gets old. I walked them through the closing documents. The deed of trust, the promissory note, the closing disclosure. Each document gets a brief explanation and a signature. The whole stack is about 40 pages. The buyers signed everything in 35 minutes. She asked one question: "Is the termite letter in here?" It was. Page 28. I've learned that first-time buyers always ask about one specific thing they read about online. For her it was termites. For the last guy it was radon. For the couple before that it was whether the title insurance covers boundary disputes. It always varies and it always comes from Google.

The buyers' certified check was $52,847.33. Exact amount. I verified the check, made a copy, and deposited it into our trust account. The lender's wire arrived at 10:38 AM, confirmed by our bookkeeper, Luisa. Total funds received: $423,647.33. Total disbursements needed: $423,647.33. Balanced to the penny. This is the part where, if something doesn't balance, you stop everything and find the discrepancy. Today it balanced on the first pass. That's a good morning.

After the buyers left, I prepared the disbursement checks. One to the seller's lender for $187,422.16 to pay off the existing mortgage. One to each real estate agent for their commissions. One to the seller for their net proceeds: $190,731.51. That's what they walk away with after 11 years of ownership. They bought the house for $228,000 in 2015. One to the county register of deeds for recording fees. One to the title company for the title insurance premium. Eight checks total. Every one verified against the closing disclosure. I'll record the deed and deed of trust at the Wake County Register of Deeds online portal this afternoon.

Lunch. Soup from the deli on Glenwood. Ate at my desk because the refinance at 2 PM needs prep. Called my daughter, Serena, who's a sophomore at NC State. She asked if she could use my Costco card this weekend. I said yes. She said, "You're the best." I said, "I know." This is our routine.

Prepped for the 2 PM refinance. This is simpler than a purchase. The homeowner, a man in his early 50s, is refinancing to pull $75,000 in equity for a kitchen renovation. His current mortgage balance is $192,000. The new loan is $267,000. The interest rate is going from 5.875% to 4.99%, which also saves him about $140 a month even with the higher balance. I prepared the closing disclosure, reviewed the title search (clean, just the existing deed of trust to be paid off), and printed the document package. The lender is a credit union and they're slower with wires. I called to confirm and was told it would be "by 1:30." In closing paralegal language, "by 1:30" means "check again at 1:45."

Wire arrived at 1:43. The homeowner arrived at 1:55. He was early, which I appreciate. The refinance closing took 20 minutes. Fewer documents than a purchase. He asked one question: whether the three-day right of rescission applied. It does. In a refinance, the borrower has three business days to cancel the transaction. I explained this. He said he was not going to cancel because he'd already picked out the countertops. I've heard that exact sentence, with different nouns substituted for "countertops," approximately 400 times.

Recorded both the deed and deed of trust from the morning closing through the Wake County e-recording portal. Confirmation numbers saved in the file. Prepared the final settlement statements and sent copies to both agents, both buyers, and the lender. Filed everything in the closing binder, which is a physical binder that goes on the shelf in our file room. We keep closing files for 10 years. The shelf currently holds approximately 2,200 binders. I have been responsible for about 1,400 of them.

Updated my closing calendar for the rest of the week: one closing tomorrow, two on Friday. Turned off the Bunn. Left at 5:10. The drive home to my house in Knightdale takes 22 minutes if I leave before 5:15 and 45 minutes if I don't. I made the window. At home, I told my husband, Ray, about the first-time buyers. He asked if they seemed happy. I said, "She asked about termites." He laughed. I heated up leftover lasagna. Watched half an episode of something on the couch. The other half will have to wait because Serena texted asking how to make rice that doesn't stick to the pot. I called her and walked her through it. She said, "Why didn't you teach me this before college?" I said, "I tried." She doesn't remember. The rice turned out fine. Everything balanced today. That's a good day.