Virtual Legal Assistant – Is This Your Magical Career?

When you work as a Virtual Legal Assistant, you can choose to work as an employee or you can set up your own business. There are pros and cons to each arrangement. When you work as an employee, you don't have to invest any money up front or find your own clients, but your pay rate, work hours, and how you work will be more restricted. When you work as an entrepreneur, you face other...

5 Biggest Networking Mistakes Guaranteed to Stall Your Career

Networking demands skill, talent and a knack for risk taking. Networking. How many times have we heard it? It’s like saying, “bless you” when you sneeze. It has, in a sense, lost its real meaning. No matter how you tweet, link, face, or gram, you have to succumb these days if you want to avoid career suicide. With all this online socializing, however, your knack for meeting strangers...

What Was I Thinking? 10 Tips to Avoid eMail Disaster

One of the most significant ways we are judged today is how we write e-mails. No longer are we subject to scores of phone calls or face-to-face meetings. Technology has completely revolutionized the way we communicate. It’s an email world out there and how you present yourself can make or break your career. While it’s a magnificent tool for communicating, email can be very damaging when used...

Sneaky Ways to Break Into the Legal Technology Career

I can’t tell you how many legal professionals have asked me how to break into the legal technology career. Then they tell me all the reasons they can’t get into the field, usually starting with the old “chicken and the egg” story. You know the one: “I can’t get a job because I don’t have experience; I don't have experience because I can’t get a job…” I have another story...

Is it time for an alternative career? Lots of options, lots of choices.

It’s that time of the year. You have received your raise and have politely waited a month or so after receiving your bonus. You have looked grateful and appreciative (all the while thinking, you’re giving me this after I worked that?) and now, frankly, you’ve been circling Indeed and quietly checking out job listings. But this time, you are thinking, “You know, am I going to find another...

The Next Illegal Question…..

Don't Get Asked and Don't Reveal..... As of January, 2018, California employers will no longer be allowed to ask candidates for their salary histories. That’s right. You will no longer be required to disclose your current or past salary to get a job offer. A new law, AB 168, goes into effect designed, in part, to eliminate wage disparity in...

Are You Calling Me Fat? …..And Other Little Career Mistakes

A few years back, when I was a Paralegal Administrator for a major law firm, the Director of Administration took me to lunch at the Yorkshire Grill. He plied me full of a pastrami sandwich and insisted that I order the potato salad full of creamy, yummy mayonnaise, a big kosher pickle and lots of salty potato chips. A diet Coke went along with it. God forbid I should get too many calories. As we...

“Girls” Just Wanna Have Funds……

"What’s your salary?” becomes a no-no in job interviews. By Chere B. Estrin   There’s a hot trend sweeping equal-pay legislation right now and some legal field industry leaders are not too happy about it.  New York, Massachusetts and Philadelphia have passed the country’s first law that prohibits employers from asking candidates for their current salaries or salary...

How to Change Specialties: Getting It Right the Second Time

Many paralegals who want to switch practice specialties write their resume with exactly what it is they are doing now, send out a cover letter stating they have lots of experience in their current practice area and are “detail oriented, a team player and a quick learner”.  In other words, “here I am, take me as I am and, oh, please train me”. And expect that will get them a new job...

Fifteen Cent Part

Long before paradigm shifts were in vogue, my dad taught me a good life lesson.  I was so young. It was the late 70's and I desperately needed a car. So, Dad and I went down to the local Chevrolet used car lot to pick out the vehicle that was to announce my social status to the world. We picked out a 1962 shiny red Covair with bright red interior and real leather seats (most of you may...