The Role of Legal Analysts in the Modern Legal World
What does a Legal Analyst Do?
Although they have existed for a long time, legal analysts are not well known to the general public and are often confused with legal assistants or paralegals. The increased complexity of today’s law and the ever increasing number of regulations have made it financially impossible for attorneys to do many of the tasks that legal analysts can easily and quickly accomplish either on staff or as legal consultants. There simply are not enough billable hours in a day to handle everything. More and more lawyers are seeing the benefit of getting legal analysts to do non-billable work so that they can focus on building the company and their own billable work.
The proper definition of a legal analyst would be a person who conducts legal research, draft legal documentation, or perform various legal administrative duties, providing support to the attorney and/or the company they work for, which may include drafting appeal briefs, processing patent applications, preparing non-trial pleadings, post trial motions, inter-office memos , drafting and filing motions and memorandums, trial exhibits, and pleadings.
However, the duties go beyond what is just written in a job description. Since there is no strict job description for a legal analyst, many other duties a legal analyst can perform are to prepare correspondences, prepare paralegal billings, audit time, paralegal invoicing, tracking, billing cross billing, e-filing with various Courts, trial preparation, some client interaction, including collecting and preparing client retainers and maintaining case files, keep tracking of enclosures and evidence received in relation to trial or other legal matters, drafting and filing of Complaints, Interrogatories and Intra-Office Memos to lead or create your own filings.
They also possess the following necessary traits for the position:
There are three educational backgrounds that legal analyst have: Paralegal Certification; a certificate in Office Management, Business Administration, Accounting, Billing, Communications; Document Management, Taxation, or Management.