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NFPA –The Leader
of the Paralegal Profession®
July 25, 2018
Jessica Watson
Standing Committee on Paralegals
American Bar Association
321 N. Clark Street, 17th Floor
Chicago, IL 60654-7598
RE: Identification of non-attorney legal professionals performing substantive legal
work under supervision of licensed attorneys as “Paralegals”
Dear Ms. Watson:
The National Federation of Paralegal Associations, Inc. (NFPA) is a non-profit
paralegal professional organization currently representing the largest number of
individual paralegal members in the United States. As the premier national paralegal
professional organization, NFPA is directed by its membership to be issues-driven
and policy-oriented.
The NFPA provides a global presence for the paralegal profession and leadership in
the legal community, and it prides itself on the quality and professionalism of its
members. As a proponent for the advancement of the paralegal profession, NFPA
strives to promote consistency in the competency, skills, ethics, and education of
paralegals. To achieve this consistency, NFPA advocates for elimination of
ambiguity arising from use of the term “legal assistant” to identify members of our
profession and a consistent definition of the term “paralegal.”
One of NFPA’s greatest challenges is to alter the existing perception of paralegals as
“legal assistants” or “legal secretaries.” While the professions overlap
responsibilities and support attorneys, legal assistants/secretaries perform tasks that
are primarily administrative in nature, whereas paralegals perform substantive legal
work under the supervision of licensed attorneys. There is a vast difference in the
training, education, experience, skills, and responsibilities of the two professions.
1
Currently, the American Bar Association (ABA) defines a paralegal as the following:
A legal assistant or paralegal is a person, qualified by education, training or work
experience who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation,
governmental agency or other entity and who performs specifically delegated
substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible.
1
It is not the intention of NFPA to diminish, demean or negate the value of those who
perform substantive work under the supervision of licensed attorneys but are still titled
“Legal Assistants.” Rather, we want to elevate the profession by advocating that going
forward, they be called “paralegals.”
