Is Being a Paralegal Stressful?

The stakes. That's it. That's the whole answer. In other practice areas, if you miss something, the consequence is money or delay. In immigration, the consequence is a person getting deported. I prepare asylum applications. The person sitting across from me is telling me about the worst thing that ever happened to them, in detail, because the detail is what makes the case. I had a client last year, a woman from Honduras named Daniela, who described being threatened by a gang member outside her daughter's school. She was shaking while she told me. I was typing. My job in that moment was to listen carefully and capture every specific detail she gave me because that declaration is the foundation of her case. If I miss something, if I get a date wrong, if I leave out the detail about the school's name or the specific threat, the immigration judge might find the testimony inconsistent with the declaration. That's not hypothetical. I've seen cases denied for inconsistencies that came down to a paralegal's notes not matching the client's testimony.

The attorney on the case, Ana Reyes, she reviews everything I prepare. She's meticulous and I trust her. But she's also handling 60 cases, and the first pass on every single one of those declarations comes from me. I sit with the client, I take the statement, I draft the declaration, I prepare the supporting evidence packets. Ana shapes the legal arguments. The raw material is mine. If my raw material has an error, Ana might catch it or she might not. I've been doing this for eight years and I check my declarations three times before I send them to Ana. Three times. Because Daniela is still here. Her daughter is in school in Beaverton. The USCIS receipt number on her case is in my spreadsheet and I check its status every Monday morning. If that case falls apart because of something I typed wrong, I can't undo that with a corrected filing. The stakes in this job are human beings. That's what stresses me.

The anger that comes through the phone. I answer calls from people in the middle of divorces, custody fights, protective order situations. These are people at their absolute worst. Not because they're bad people, but because their lives are coming apart and they need someone to listen, and a lot of the time, I'm that someone. The attorney, Paul Whitfield, he's in court or in meetings for most of the day. So when a client calls at 4:45 PM in a panic because her ex just showed up at the school to pick up the kids and today is not his day, she gets me. And I have to be calm, get the facts, determine whether this is a violation of the custody order, and either calm her down or tell her to call the police. I've done that call maybe 200 times in eleven years and it never gets routine because the panic in their voice is real every single time.

The part that stresses me, specifically, is the kids in the middle of it. I prepare financial declarations for divorce cases. I organize discovery responses. I draft parenting plan proposals. And in every case, there are children whose lives are being decided by two adults who sometimes can't be in the same room without a court order. I had a case last month where the parents were arguing about which parent got the kid on Christmas morning. The motion we filed was eight pages long. Eight pages of legal argument about whether a 6-year-old opens presents at Mom's house or Dad's house on December 25th. I typed every word of that motion and the whole time I was thinking about my nephew, who is 6, and how he'd feel if he knew adults were filing court papers about his Christmas. My nephew is fine. His parents are together. But the kids in my files are not my nephew and I carry them home anyway. My wife, Darla, she can tell when I've had a custody case day because I'm quieter at dinner. I don't talk about the cases because I can't. I just sit with it.

The volume. My boss, Ray Garza, handles about 180 active cases at any given time. He's a solo practitioner with me and a part-time receptionist named Dolores. That's it. Three people, 180 cases, everything from DWIs to felony drug charges to assault cases. I manage the calendar for all of them. Court dates, filing deadlines, client meetings, jail visits. Ray is in court three to four mornings a week. When he's in court, I'm the office. The phone rings and it's a client's mother asking why her son's case hasn't been resolved yet. It's been eight months. I explain that the court's docket is backed up and Ray is working the case. She doesn't believe me, or she does but she's frustrated and I'm the person she can yell at. Meanwhile, Dolores is transferring another call, a bondsman wants to know if Ray will take a new case, and I have 14 emails from the DA's office with discovery packets that I need to download, organize, and review before Ray can look at them.

The stress isn't any one thing. It's the pile. On Monday morning, I look at my task list and there are 30 to 40 items on it. Some are small, like "file continuance motion for Herrera." Some are large, like "review 600 pages of police reports for Martinez trial next month." By Friday, I've completed maybe 25 of the 40 items and 15 new ones have appeared. The pile never shrinks. I've been here four years and the pile has never been at zero. Not once. Ray tells me to prioritize by deadline, which I do, but when you have six things due this week and three of them are court-ordered deadlines that can't be moved, the prioritization is "everything is urgent, pick the one that will get Ray sanctioned if it's late." I go home some nights and my boyfriend, Marco, asks how my day was and I say "busy" because the alternative is a 20-minute monologue about discovery packets and bond forfeitures that would make his eyes glaze over by minute three.

The closing. In corporate transactional work, everything builds toward the closing. A client is buying a company, or selling a division, or merging with another entity, and there's a closing date. Every document has to be perfect by that date. Not good. Not close. Perfect. I prepare closing binders, which are organized collections of every document involved in the transaction. Purchase agreements, escrow instructions, secretary's certificates, good standing certificates, lien releases, UCC filings, opinion letters, consents, assignments. One closing I did in January had 87 documents in the binder. Eighty-seven. Each one had to be signed by the right person, notarized if required, dated correctly, and in the right tab of the binder.

The stress is the last 48 hours before closing. That's when everything goes wrong. A good standing certificate arrives and it's for the wrong entity because the client has four LLCs with similar names and the Secretary of State's office pulled the wrong one. The buyer's counsel sends redline changes to the purchase agreement at 11 PM the night before closing. The escrow agent needs wire instructions that nobody sent. My attorney, Priscilla Yates, she's on the phone with the other side's counsel at 10 PM negotiating a holdback provision, and she needs me to update Exhibit B to the purchase agreement to reflect the new number. The new number is $1.4 million in holdback instead of $900,000 and that change cascades through three other documents. I'm at my desk at 10:30 PM changing numbers in documents that will transfer $28 million between two companies the next morning. If Exhibit B says $900,000 and the purchase agreement says $1.4 million, somebody catches it at the closing table and the whole thing pauses while I scramble. That hasn't happened to me. But it happened to a paralegal at another firm in our building, and the story circulated on our floor for weeks. That fear, the fear of the inconsistency nobody catches until signing, is what I carry.

The stories you can't repeat and the outcomes you can't control. I work employment discrimination and harassment cases. Wrongful termination. Retaliation. Sexual harassment. Our clients come to us after they've been fired for reporting something, or harassed and told to deal with it, or passed over for a promotion that went to someone less qualified. They tell me what happened and I take notes and I organize their story into a legal framework: timeline, witnesses, documents, damages. The story behind the framework is always worse than the legal summary.

Last year I worked a case where a woman, call her the client because I can't use her name, she was a warehouse supervisor at a distribution company outside of Albuquerque. She reported her manager for groping her during a shift change. The company's HR department conducted an "investigation" that lasted three days and concluded the claim was unsubstantiated. Two weeks later she was moved to the night shift, which she hadn't requested. A month after that, she was terminated for "performance issues" that had never been documented before she filed the complaint. I built that timeline. I pulled her personnel file, her performance reviews (all satisfactory or above), the HR investigation notes (four pages, two of which were the complaint form she filled out), and the termination letter. Our attorney, Vince Cordova, filed a retaliation claim. The company's lawyers, a big defense firm out of Phoenix, sent us 3,200 pages of discovery documents, most of which were irrelevant policy manuals designed to bury us in paper. I reviewed all 3,200 pages. The relevant documents totaled about 90 pages. The other 3,110 were noise.

The case settled for $85,000 before trial. The client's original demand was $250,000. Vince advised her to take it because juries in Bernalillo County are unpredictable and the risk of walking away with nothing was real. She took it. After attorney's fees and costs, she received about $52,000. She'd been out of work for seven months. She cried on the phone when I told her the amount. Not because she was happy. Because she'd spent a year of her life fighting for something and $52,000 was the number that the system assigned to it. I said, "I'm sorry." She said, "I know you are." That was a Wednesday. I went home and my partner, Wayne, asked how work was and I said, "Fine." That's what stresses me. The knowing and the not being able to talk about it and the outcomes that are technically wins but don't feel like justice.

The attorneys. I know that sounds disloyal. But I've been doing this for 12 years across two firms and the single biggest source of stress in my life is not the deadlines, not the clients, not the case complexity. It's the attorneys. Specifically, attorneys who don't manage their own time and expect me to absorb the consequences. My current supervising attorney, a partner named Walter Briggs, he has a habit of waiting until two days before a filing deadline to start reviewing the draft that I gave him a week ago. So I prepare the motion on Monday. I send it to Walter. Walter doesn't look at it until Thursday afternoon. The deadline is Friday at 5 PM. Walter sends it back to me at 4 PM on Thursday with redline edits that require me to restructure the argument section, add three new exhibits, and re-paginate the table of authorities. That's not a one-hour task. That's a four-hour task, minimum.

So I stay until 8 PM on Thursday, come in early Friday, finalize everything by noon, and file it by 3 PM. Walter says "nice work getting that done." Getting it done was never the problem. The timeline was the problem. If he'd reviewed my draft on Tuesday, I'd have finished the revisions on Wednesday during normal business hours and filed on Thursday with a day to spare. Instead, I missed my daughter Kenzie's soccer game on Thursday night because Walter has a workflow that treats my evenings as a buffer for his procrastination. Kenzie is 11. She doesn't understand why I miss her games. She's starting to stop asking me to come. That's the part that actually hurts. Not the late night. The look on her face when I text Marcus, my husband, to say I won't make it.

I've raised this with Walter twice. The first time, he said he'd try to review things earlier. He did, for about two weeks. The second time, he said, "This is the nature of litigation." Which, no. It isn't. The nature of litigation is that some deadlines are genuinely urgent and unpredictable. The nature of Walter is that he puts things off. Those are different problems and only one of them requires me to miss my kid's soccer game. I stay because the salary is $67,000, which is good for Hartford, the benefits are solid, and the other attorneys I support are better about this. But Walter is my primary attorney and his time management is my daily stress.