Rocky Mountain Legal Assistants Association 1984 Survey of Paralegals
| Publication year | 1985 |
| Pages | 972 |
| Citation | Vol. 14 No. 6 Pg. 972 |
1985, June, Pg. 972. Rocky Mountain Legal Assistants Association 1984 Survey of Paralegals
The Rocky Mountain Legal Assistants Association ("RMLAA") Survey Committee received 150 responses to the questionnaires distributed, with the results discussed below. RMLAA expresses its appreciation to those 150 members of the paralegal community who saw the importance of the survey and participated.
The information contained in this survey is current as of July 1984. It should be noted that certain questions were not answered by some respondents, a few respondents provided ambiguous entries, and some questions drew more than one answer from some respondents. For these reasons, the results under each question will not always total 150 responses. The results have been carefully compiled and are shown as a straight statistical tallying of the survey responses as well as a more thorough analysis of the results in which certain of the responses are correlated with salary.
The typical legal assistant responding to RMLAA's survey is a 29-year-old female, employed in a law firm in downtown Denver with from six to twenty-five attorneys. She works primarily in litigation, has been a paralegal for from one to three years and with her employer one year or less. Her annual salary is approximately $16,800. There are from one to five legal assistants in her office.
She has a private office, shares a secretary with one or two others and spends most of her time communicating (both verbal and written), investigating or fact gathering, analyzing documents, drafting documents, completing forms, preparing exhibits or on document control.
The average annual salary is $20,675. By category, litigation paralegals constitute the majority of the sample (47 percent), followed by real estate (19 percent) and corporate (16 percent), with the remainder distributed over many categories.
Eighty-one percent of the respondents are employed by private law firms, 11 percent work for government entities, 7 percent for corporations, only one respondent was self-employed and no legal aid paralegals submitted questionnaires.
Fifty percent of the respondents have been employed as paralegals for three years or less. Twenty-seven percent work for law firms or...
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