This Paralegal Book Title Makes People Uncomfortable

Speaker A: Why do we mentally cap paralegals at employment income when nearly every other skilled profession explores leverage, ownership, scalability, consulting, education, and entrepreneurship? Hi, I'm Jacqueline Foster. Welcome back to the Paralegal Business podcast. Today, in honor of the one year anniversary of my book Paralegals should be Millionaires, I want to talk about it. Whenever people hear the title paragraph, paralegals should be millionaires, there's always someone who goes, okay, but are there any millionaire paralegals? Or okay, so what? Then? Attorneys should be billionaires. And honestly, those questions are exactly why I wrote this book. Because we've been conditioned to think about paralegal skills only inside the employee market. Hard stop. As if indeed salaries are the final determination of our economic value that we will ever reach for the rest of time. So let's start out by me talking a little bit why I chose the title Paralegals should be Millionaires. I had already written this book, or a good chunk of it, and the title is actually going to be Build, Believe Become, which, funny enough, the bonus chapter at the end is Build, Believe, Become, which is a powerful, powerful message. But one day I was cleaning my house, I was vacuuming the floors, listening to a podcast on entrepreneurship, and this particular guest that was on this particular podcast was actually a nail tech that turned her expertise into online courses during the pandemic. Fast forward four years, five years later, she had built a scalable business in into the millions of dollars of revenue. And in that moment, while I was vacuuming up my piles and piles of dog hair, when I heard that origin story of her business and what she built it to, I said, paralegals should be millionaires. That was the first thing that came to mind. And there's nothing to say, you know, nail tech, I do my nails at home. So I'm very grateful for the things I've learned online about doing my nails at home and making them last through my barn chores and my chickens and my horses and all the things. But the point is, is that paralegals have monetizable expertise too, right? If somebody can take one skill set, such as doing their nails, create digital products around it, why can't paralegals realize that they have monetizable expertise too? So let's talk about the real meaning behind the title Paralegal Shipping Millionaires. First, I want to clarify what this title is not. This title is not demanding million dollar salaries from law firms to paralegals. It is not saying every paralegal becomes wealthy overnight. It is not some, um, MLM girl Boss get rich quick energy. It is not anti attorney or some big declaration that paralegals should make more than attorneys. The title is a symbolic declaration of of the value that paralegals bring to the legal ecosystem. The revenue they support that flows through law firms, cases that they move forward, client relationships that they maintain, operational systems that they build, risk they help reduce, and ultimately the time they create for attorneys themselves. But despite all that value creation, many paralegals never explore ownership, leverage or scalability of the exact skill sets that they possess today. And let's talk about why the majority of paralegals would want to if they thought it was possible, but never explore ownership, leverage, scalability within a specialty that they possess is that the employee market mentality is so, so incredibly powerful on the paralegal profession as a whole. Paralegals historically have been taught apply for jobs, negotiate salaries, maybe ask for raises here and there, especially after a big win, and ultimately try to climb titles that haven't historically existed for paralegals to climb to. But what paralegals have not been conditioned to think about and explore is how they can package their expertise. They can build systems they can consult, they can freelance to law firms and fractional capacities with their skill sets of paralegal support, admin support, whatever that may be, they can educate, create digital assets. Paralegals are the best position to create courses and programs for other paralegals, new paralegals, paralegals wanting to explore other practice areas and law firms themselves that need educational materials to provide to their team to help develop their own skill sets, they can create agencies and ultimately contribute, become a huge component to the legal process, outsourcing support businesses. So in contrast with other professions, we see nail techs, fitness coaches, marketers, photographers, accountants, therapists, consultants, fractional CFOs, graphic designers, dog trainers that are leveraging their actual expertise, right? They're what they know what they can do, either teach or do or serve in the in their ecosystem, they are exploring ownership, they are exploring leverage, they are exploring scalability beyond a rigid cap. And so why is it that every other skill based profession talks openly about leverage and entrepreneurship and it's not pushed to the side, it's not. Oh my gosh, what are you talking about? You're not an attorney. Just sit down, shut up, be thankful you have a job. Why are we not in other skilled based professions talking like that? But in legal support paralegals specifically, we still act like employment is the only ethical or legitimate lane. And now pause here for a moment. I do want to make Very clear. In all of the business advice, guidance, exploration I have in this book I primarily discuss paralegals leveraging their skill sets to support law firms in a fractional or consulting capacity and or legal courses supporting the legal industry. I do not do any, uh, coaching or mentorship around paralegals supporting the general public in any way, shape or form. Not that I'm against it, it's just not my lane of expertise. Let's, let's talk about what actually drove me to publish the book. Now I had this book in, in the works for I want to say three to four years. I started it, I stopped, I scrapped it, I started again, I stopped. It was kind of a work in progress. A lot of imposter syndrome, a lot of writer's block, a lot of I don't know the exact message I um, am m trying to put out into the world. And so I'm glad I did wait because this was the book that I needed to write, not ones that I had started before. Many how to guides, things like that. Now don't get me wrong, an entire section is dedicated to the how of building businesses as a paralegal or legal assistant or other legal professional. Um, but the first half of the book is really talking about the shift that is happening in the legal industry. So let's talk about it just really quick right here. Fractional work is growing and if you followed me for a while, I feel like I'm getting a little bit repetitive in talking about it, but let's just hash it out really quick anyway. Fractional work is growing. Remote work has normalized. Law firms are outsourcing specialized support now more than they ever have before. The legal process outsourcing market is growing tremendously. I believe Forbes quoted it at uh, 20% per year. Why firms not only want, but need flexibility in how they develop their team as they scale their own law firm. Firms don't always want nor can justify and more so justify full time hires for roles that are really critical within the law firm. Now that might look like paralegal support, legal assistance support, client relationship management, but it also looks like fractional CFOs, fractional CMOs, fractional tech support. What they're now realizing is they can access specialized high leverage support in a fractional capacity that has true value in the firm. And prior to, I guess this big shift, the boom of 2020 when the pandemic hit and forced attorneys to figure out remote work as we've evolved throughout the last, I would say six years, yes, fractional support, freelancing has been around since the 90s, maybe even before. I couldn't tell you exactly when the conception was. But now, circa, uh, 2026, 2025, in these shifting years between 2020 and now, attorneys really are starting to understand leverage and they're really understanding how to outsource properly. And now it's not this radical economy. Businesses are starting to learn how to leverage tech better, how to leverage automation, AI, the works. But the radical part is that paralegals are realizing that, hey, I can participate in that economy too. So let me just really quick talk about that shift. 2020 to 2026. I have worked with over 500 attorneys in consulting the staffing structure of their firm. I've helped them identify really strategic hires, really strategic placements, how to better utilize their existing team, how to supplement their existing team when the full time hire is the right move. And so back in 2020, when I first started my paralegal business, those first handful sets of clients that I worked with, and I would say this was 2020 through kind of mid-2021 into leading up to 2022. But the conversations that I had with these attorneys were things like I had to furlough my paralegal for a month while everything was first shutting down and a bigger firm swooped them up. Another one would say my profits are plummeting and I just don't have the work nor the budget for a full time paralegal employee right now. Another would say we have to work remotely, but I have no technical systems in place to be able to do that. Can you help? And that uh, these are all real life stories. I had to think back to think to specific attorneys. And that last one I remember, I'm like, well, where, where are all your files? On my desktop. I'm like, okay, that's going to be interesting. But we worked through it, right? So that was the beginning era of my company, which eventually was rebranded to Dell Trust and then I later sold it in 2024. But let me talk to you about 2022-2026 conversations that I've been having with firms. And I want you to hear the contrast between the knee jerk reaction, the panic, the uh, my, my paralegal was furloughed. I need a quick 1099 support. I just need whatever that may be to. Now the conversations went a little bit more like this. I'm a solo attorney, I have a great legal assistant, but they cannot perform the paralegal work. I have about 30 hours per month of substantive drafting work and Would really like to find a specialized paralegal in my practice area and jurisdiction to cover that work. Or they would say I'm in between growth phases. In my law firm. We had a new baseline that seems to have stabilized. I don't want to overload my existing paralegal as we grow to our next level of revenue, but I just cannot justify hiring a full time role for this yet. So we want to hire fractional legal assistance support so my existing paralegal can stay focused on that paralegal work. One more example would be I need to keep my paralegal focused on the complex drafting of motions, trial prep and case management. But we are bottlenecked in discovery specifically and frankly my paralegal hates discovery and it slows them down. Do you have someone who can focus specifically on Discovery for around 50 hours per month? Notice the difference between 2020 knee jerk reaction. Help me. I'm. I don't know what to do. The market's insane. I don't know where to find a paralegal. Everybody sent home. Help, help, help to forward thinking for firms paying for outcomes, for firms paying for that expertise. What may be legal assistance support to complex paralegal drafting to simply solving a discovery bottleneck amongst a million other examples I don't have time for here. Today they are focusing on the revenue driving work. Whether it be focusing on the revenue driving work, they want their existing paralegal and firm to stay very centered on or needing to hire somebody fractionally to drive in more revenue type work. Right? So this is where the specialization creates that pricing power. And again, paralegals should be millionaires is a declaration of value. It is not saying start a business. I am promising you, you will be a millionaire. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see paralegals build businesses and become millionaires. And I'm hoping over the next five years we will be seeing that because why not? There's millionaires out there that became millionaires because they started shipping potatoes in the mail with funny sayings on them for people. Right? Send my mother in law a funny statement on my potato. I always have to use that example because it's I, I can, I get the humor in it. But if people can become millionaires shipping actual potatoes as a joke in the mail. Anyway, I digress. It is about paralegals identifying where they fit in the ecosystem of fractional entrepreneurial type work that they really truly their scaling ability is limitless. That's business. There is no limit on where you can scale your business. To based on your unique goals, based on your unique desires. I've worked with over a thousand paralegals in various capacities, whether through my free courses, my webinars, what have you, or my full programs like the Paralegals and Business Society, the Legal course Creator Academy. I have worked with so many paralegals and each one of them has a unique preference. I've helped a paralegal scale to $140,000 a year business as a solo. She wanted no employees. She didn't want to scale beyond herself. She just wanted to work with the best clients she could possibly pick for herself that paid her really well, travel the world and live that lifestyle. I've worked with paralegals that have scaled over three years into $750,000 revenues. I myself scaled my business through full acquisition to a larger company. All to say, again, I am not. And I feel like it's really important for me to maintain this because I don't want to. And maybe, maybe the title is a little bit risque. I don't know. Whatever. We make decisions and we must live with them. It's a declaration of value. Okay? And obviously it's a decent sized book, so there's a lot to it. Let's move over before I get into some closing and some real insight into the book and what you can expect when you buy it. Why does this conversation make people feel uncomfortable in the first place? Why? Even if I just said paralegalship, why does that make people uncomfortable? Is it because it feels like it shifts the hierarchy in law firms? Is it because, you know, what does that mean for other professionals in the industry? Is it because where does that put the bar? I think that the conversation makes people uncomfortable because people associate service professionals with limitation and they just have to accept what they're given in the job market. I chose this. I knew what the income potential was. Wealth conversations just feel taboo in general. Trust me, I got it. Like, you know, you live in a small town. I mean, you don't go running around talking about how much money you make. I think it's because people confuse entrepreneurship or wealth goals with greed. Have a whole conversation about greed in there and I talk about my son in a grocery store. It's true stories and I'd be interested, like, let me know which one you think when you read the book. Which, which scenario do you think my son actually was that day? And I think it's truly because we've normalized, undervaluing, support professionals. I think that since the inception of the paralegal back in the 60s, the late 60s, where it was, the world was becoming more litigious. They needed more time in court and mediation and meetings and negotiations, what have you, that they said, okay, well, we don't want to hire another attorney, we don't have the budget. Let's see if we can train our legal secretary to do some more substantive drafting work. We'll call them a paralegal. But really, it's like you get the same salary, just do more work. Right. And it took us a long time to merge out of that, and we're still not out of that. Really. It's that hybrid mess, which I talk about in here of you perform both paralegal and legal assistant work or legal secretary work, but you're expected to do high level work for that low level compensation. And I think ultimately, um, when people hear paralegals shouldn't be millionaires, they might hear ego. Call me egotistical. I don't know what to say. I just love the paralegal profession and I am a huge advocate for it. I was a paralegal. I know. And I talk about specific instances. You hear that worth your weight in gold mentality. But really what I actually mean in here is ownership. So I gotta use my soft cover, by the way. Yes, it is, uh, hard. And you know, I just realized that poor people listening on the podcast, you're probably hearing a lot of that. I, I talk with my hands a lot and I just keep tapping this and I'm very sorry. That's probably going to be annoying now that I'm done recording that. So with that, what I mean by paralegal should be millionaires is ownership. Let's start reading just a few things from the book. Can't believe it's been a year. Well, it was a year on May 5th. I just kind of forgot about it. All right, let's read this. In the beginning, here's the truth the legal industry needs to accept. Paralegals were never meant to be assistants. From the start, they were designed to be strategic partners to attorneys. But instead of establishing a clear defined profession, the legal industry built a hybrid role. A tangled mess of administrative duties and complex legal work that satisfies no one and holds everyone back. Imagine if, uh, from the beginning we had set non negotiable boundaries. No administrative duties disguised as paralegal work. No title blending a structured career path with mentorship and leadership roles. Imagine if law firms were required to treat paralegals as revenue generators within the firm, with incentives tied directly to the profitability they bring in, we'd have a completely different legal landscape. And to that point, I have one more in the beginning section here, and this is really important. Okay? And I really want you to think about this. This is after I talk about the cross examination that changed everything and my involvement in it. I talk about the appeal that almost crumbled. I talk about the missing page worth $1 million. True story. I talked about the affidavit that reunited a family. And they're all true stories, by the way, of my paralegal experience, which is what I have to draw on. And then through all that and the uni I played in these cases that led to really favorable outcomes. Let me ask you, if my title wasn't paralegal, if it was senior evidence and analyst, settlement strategist, or Director of client relationships, how differently would people perceive those moments? How differently would they value me? It's easy to dismiss this problem as systemic, something baked into the structure of law firms that we are powerless to change. But here's the reality. We are not impotent. Change doesn't start with a memo from a managing partner or a policy update from an association. Change begins with us. Instead of waiting for the traditional legal industry to thaw from its frozen stance and outdated staffing models, paralegals are taking the lead and rewriting the scripts themselves. And before I get into some closing and I really want you to stick with me and I want to read a couple more pieces from this book, I want you to go leverage the free resources I have on my website. I have a free rate and revenue calculator that you can use to determine what your exact experience, your specialty, how you would imagine structuring a fractional business for law firms, what you can anticipate making play around with that revenue calculator based on where you could scale it to if you added a team, what have you. I have a free training on transitioning from employee to business owner the safe and stable way. I'm not here to tell anybody to quit their jobs overnight and lose all financial security on a whim. I have the Paralegals and Business Society which is a low monthly cost membership just packed with resources. Go check out the vaults and see everything we're talking about inside. I also have the legal course Creator Academy, a path a lot of the paralegals, especially the ones inside of PIBs, are exploring to add second revenue streams or make that their full time job of creating courses and mentorship programs and digital products for this industry. So definitely go check it out. Everything is below. But I want to end this. Inspirational, but still grounded. This book is not telling every paralegal to quit their job tomorrow. It's asking bigger questions. What is your expertise actually worth? What happens when paralegals stop seeing themselves as limited to job postings? What happens when we realize our skills have value beyond employment? And what happens when we participate in wealth creation for ourselves? Designed. You have an amazing exercise to design your own ideal life and what you want to create for yourself. Financially speaking, freedom of time and what you do with your day instead of just labor, right? We only ever talk about labor. Why can't we also love what we do and shine in our actual zone of genius and love and passion? Right? Chapter nine. You are the architect of your future. You need to stop thinking about what's merely possible based on your current circumstances and start asking what's desirable. It's not that paralegals aren't intelligent, driven, or capable. They are. They've been fed a lie, wrapped neatly in a package labeled, you chose this profession. You knew the earning potential. Those messages aren't spoken outright, but they're implied. Layered into job descriptions, salary negotiations, and the lack of clear, clear career advancement paths. They're whispered in the moments when a paralegal is Passover for a raise despite carrying the weight of cases that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Just because you chose this profession doesn't mean you chose to be undervalued. Just because you're not an attorney doesn't mean your contribution is worth less. Just because the industry has painted paralegals into a specific box doesn't mean you must stay there. I'm here to tell you that the only thing standing between you and breaking through is your belief that you can paralegals should be millionaires is not a promise of wealth. It is a symbolic declaration that the value paralegals create deserves bigger opportunities, bigger ownership, and bigger conversations than this industry has historically allowed. And I will leave you with this because, yes, I am a huge advocate for paralegal entrepreneurship. It's what I have centered my entire career and leadership around. So of course I'm going to show paralegals how to do it in my book, right? Personally, I stand for expanding what's possible for paralegals, uh, breaking the idea that employment is their only path, and proving that they are fully capable of building independent businesses that support law firms and legal professionals on their own terms. So I will leave you with this. Why entrepreneurship is the game changer. Why do I keep talking about paralegal entrepreneurship because it's the ultimate catapult. The rocket fuel that can blast us straight through this invisible ceiling and right past these internal walls. Just as it has for thousands of associate attorneys sick of waiting on the partnership track. Look, plenty of paralegals genuinely love their in house roles. And if that's you, fantastic. I'm sincerely happy for you. And I'm, um, in no way trying to make that statement sound passive aggressive, but let's be honest, you picked up this book for a reason. Maybe you're tired of feeling boxed in by someone else's rules. Or perhaps you know you were meant for something bigger. Deep down, that restless itch you can't ignore is your sign to leap. And I'm telling you right now, building your own business is the most straightforward path to the next level of free freedom, income, and impact that you crave. And I'm not just talking about offering one off freelance services to attorneys. When I say entrepreneurship, I mean creating entire revenue ecosystems that tap into what you're good at. Whether that's streamlining medical record requests for busy personal injury firms, consulting on intake and client care, trial prep, designing unique processes or tools that reduce law firm chaos, or even branching out entirely with courses, coaching, or recruitment programs that leverage your paralegal expertise. I did it. I scaled a paralegal business from scratch. Which not only changed my life, but also opened my eyes to how the industry will never respect us the way we deserve until more of us stake our claim on the entrepreneurial front. Because here's the thing. When paralegals start generating significant revenue, people notice. When paralegals build thriving businesses, the old guard has no choice but to acknowledge our actual value. All. Uh, right. Grab your copy of Paralegals should be Millionaires today. It is available in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and Audible. So whatever you prefer, you can grab it. It is linked below in the description. And as always, thank you so much for watching this all the way through. I appreciate your support. Give me a comment on what resonated most with you in this entire TED Talk. About what my book, Paralegals Should Be Millionaires. I would love to hear from you. And until next time, have great days ahead of you.