PARALEGAL OPS – Paralegal has become the most common career path to the legal operations field, according to the recently released Legal Operations Compensation Survey from the software provider Brightflag. However, despite their paralegal experience, this cohort is paid dramatically less than legal ops professionals with other backgrounds, the study found. Heads of legal ops who were paralegals earn 72 cents for every $1 earned by legal ops heads from other backgrounds, the survey found. For legal ops teams overall, paralegals earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by nonparalegals. Kevin Cohn, Brightflag’s chief customer officer, told Law.com’s Trudy Knockless the only explanation he can think of for this phenomenon is “anchoring,” the tendency to base compensation on what a candidate previously earned rather than what the position should pay. “As these professionals move from paralegal to legal ops, their compensation is being set as some percentage increase from current [salary], rather than rebaselining for a completely different role,” he said.
TO CHATBOT OR NOT – ChatGPT. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? Assuming you aren’t Encino Man, we’re going to assume you have. But seriously folks, chatbot capabilities have grown significantly in recent months. Still, as Law.com’s Rhys Dipshan reports, law firms’ concerns with the format have grown right along with it, making a bot revolution in legal appear unlikely. “I think that the law firms out there will be wary of this because they will perceive it as removing value and human interaction between them and their clients,” said Jeff Marple, director of digital transformation strategy at Keesal Propulsion Labs, a standalone legal tech company created by California law firm Keesal, Young & Logan. “I think there’s going to be a whole bunch of [legal professionals] that are going to say, ‘this is going to take away from that. We can’t trust it, it opens us up to liability. What if it gets it wrong, [and someone is] lazy and not checking the returns on it?’—all that kind of thing.”
