Here on Wall Street, where I have worked for 21 years, paralegal jobs are revolving doors in the most revered, most selective, pickiest law firms in the world.

This white-shoe workplace is sharply divided into two kinds of people: the prestigious "Legal" and blue-collar back-room "Administrative". Legal assistants work at the bottom of the Legal side, which makes them eligible for overtime and other basic benefits, while offering perqs that not even a partner's secretary can aspire to: overtime food allowances matching lawyers and partners; a personal desk or private cubicle with your own phone line; and because they almost always graduate from prestigious universities, invites to private parties all over the Financial District, or tickets to the U.S. Open or the MTV Awards from vendors to entice them to select their services for financial printing and photocopies.

But even here, there are 2 kinds of Legal assistants.

One knows the intricacies of lawsuits, and works in either Litigation or Bankruptcy; those who bothered to sign up for one of the better Paralegal Certificate courses (the one at NYU is big around here) come equipped with keen understanding of the complex forms and filings. They know how to negotiate through the highly specialized paperwork of pretrials and trials. They know details and they can set priorities.

It takes years to learn this stuff on the job. Because new litigation lawyers don't learn it in law school, they depend on their paralegals to get it right. Paralegals can do that.

The other kind of legal assistant is terrific at things like proofread and organization. That's right up my alley. In fact, that's how I got hired here, back in the super-boom of the late 1980's, when the stock market was reaching for the sky and Leveraged Buyouts kept lenders and their counsel busy 24/7.

No one had computers then; there was no spellcheck, no email, no automatic blacklining to show how drafts had changed to incorporate terms negotiated at 5 o'clock in the morning. Miss a zero on a $200 million transaction and you're talking about some serious losses. There were other details, too, that I was good at: Ordering and picking up meeting dinners, arranging for fast and efficient Xeroxing and mailing, monitoring delivery and receipt of current drafts, even something like great coffee and pizza in the middle of the night put my name on the map of people who get things done. That, more than anything, is what makes a great paralegal

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