Hiring a paralegal
Seventy applications, a practice area that genuinely matters for some of the work and not for the rest, and a screening habit of requiring the specialism for all of it.
Some of the specialism requirement is real. Most of it is habit. Legal support work does have genuine practice-area dependency — a conveyancing paralegal walking into contentious probate is starting from close to zero on process, and the deadlines in litigation are unforgiving in a way commercial work is not. But firms routinely require three years in the exact specialism for roles where perhaps a third of the work is truly area-specific and the rest is drafting, bundling, chasing and client contact that transfers cleanly. On a pile of seventy that requirement removes strong people for the sake of a learning curve measured in weeks. Meanwhile the quality that actually matters — the temperament to notice a wrong date on page nine — is invisible on every CV.
How much of this is really specialism
Selene tests the practice-area requirement rather than accepting it, then goes after the detail work underneath.
Practice area, supervision, and the actual task mix
Splitting the work into what is genuinely area-specific and what is general legal support is the useful move here. It usually turns out that the specialism matters for a minority of the job, which changes who is worth reading.
One sentence changes the guide
The willingness half is the real signal. Legal support work sits below people who are busy, expensive and sometimes brusque, and the cost of a missed limitation date or a wrong figure in a schedule is enormous — so a paralegal who will interrupt a partner is worth considerably more than one who is merely observant.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The one who spots the thing the fee-earner missed, and mentions it.”
→ Catching and raising an error became a must-have; litigation experience stayed weighted but stopped being a gate.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, and the requirement the conversation opened with sits at weight 3 rather than at a gate. On a pile of seventy that single change is the difference between reading forty applications and reading twelve.
One gate, and a deliberate decision not to add a second
Right to work is the only genuine fact here. The requirement the firm arrived with — three years in litigation — was deliberately not made an application-page question, because it is not a fact about eligibility, it is evidence about suitability. Gating on it would remove a third of the pile silently and without appeal; scoring it at weight 3 means a strong candidate from another practice area can still surface, and you can decide.
Scored on the catch, and on saying so
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for instances of noticing something wrong and escalating it, since that pairing is what distinguishes a careful paralegal from a merely competent one.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Testing which requirements are genuine gates and which are habit, before either becomes a filter
- Reading all 70 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that still contains strong candidates from adjacent practice areas
- An interview brief covering the litigation process gaps for anyone who has them
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- Any drafting or proofreading test, which on this role is genuinely predictive
- The interview, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
Test your own requirement
Say how much of the work is really specialism-specific — the answer is usually less than the job ad claims.