Paralegals and Legal Assistants

Assist lawyers by investigating facts, preparing legal documents, or researching legal precedent. Conduct research to support a legal proceeding, to formulate a defense, or to initiate legal action.

The occupation of paralegals and legal assistants faces an automation risk of 45.2%, with a base risk calculated at 45.8%. This moderate level of potential automation is primarily due to the structured and repetitive nature of many paralegal tasks, which can be efficiently handled by advanced software. For example, the preparation of affidavits and legal documents, as well as organizing and maintaining files—both in paper and electronically—are highly systematized and lend themselves to automation. Similarly, tasks like preparing, editing, or reviewing legal documents and conducting research on case facts by searching public records and internet sources are increasingly becoming manageable by AI-driven tools. Legal software can now draft templates, flag inconsistencies, and search vast legal databases quickly, reducing the need for human labor in these areas. Despite significant advances in legal technology, certain aspects of a paralegal's job remain resistant to automation. For example, maintaining and monitoring legal volumes to ensure a law library is current requires nuanced understanding and sometimes manual updating, which is less predictable and harder to codify for machines. Likewise, appraising and inventorying property for estate planning involves in-person assessments and judgments that software finds challenging to replicate. Tasks like arbitrating disputes in real estate closings or reviewing title searches rely on interpersonal skills, negotiation, and subjective reasoning, making them harder for algorithms to automate entirely. The bottleneck skills identified for paralegals and legal assistants highlight the role of human creativity in the occupation, specifically originality, which is measured at 2.6% and 2.9% in two top-resistant tasks. These relatively low levels indicate that while originality is not the primary skill required in most daily tasks, it becomes crucial for non-standard, unique situations where legal strategy or out-of-the-box thinking is needed. Automation systems, though efficient with routine or rule-based work, still struggle with tasks demanding original reasoning, adaptation, or insight into human behavior. As a result, while many administrative and research duties can be streamlined or fully automated, paralegals continue to provide irreplaceable value when handling complex, ambiguous, or interpersonal aspects of legal work.