Am I just not meant to be a paralegal?
Hi, this is going to be a lengthy read but I need to vent. I’m currently working at a small PI law firm for about six months now. This is my first office job (all my past jobs have been cleaning or warehouse jobs) and also my first time doing any work in the legal field. I’m currently going to school to get my paralegal studies degree, which has helped me a lot while working at this firm . There are two attorneys, I’ll refer to them as pb and jelly. I work under pb, who as a person is fairly nice and understanding; as a boss though, he’s super OCD who knit picks everything and I mean everything. He gets angry for the smallest things (ex. I have carpet in my office and there was ONE paper clip on the on the floor next to my desk and he got upset bc I didn’t pick it up). Jelly is the partner, who as a person, and a boss, is just straight up rude and an asshole. He talks down to his clients all the time, talks to people like they’re stupid or just in a condescending way.
They hired me as a legal assistant, which I was excited/surprised that they took a chance and hired me with no absolute prior experience. I was able to pick up things pretty fast in the first four months, which pb noticed and decided I was ready to start doing more paralegal tasks, such as drafting up S&Cs, BP’s, ICOs, keeping track of his calendar, and the like. I was looking forward to the challenge but the problem is I was self teaching myself. In my paralegal courses I haven’t learned how to do any of this stuff. Pb is too busy and stressed to show me how I would go about drafting these docs. The only other paralegal is also the manager of the firm, so she’s always swamped with things to do. The way I’ve been learning is by using already filed docs to guide me with what I’ve been assigned. These last couple of weeks have been overwhelming because every time I go to show pb my work he gets annoyed that something is always wrong. Examples are: the margins in the doc are off(they’ll be 0.5” instead of 1”); I didn’t file the doc correctly (we use trial works) I placed a letter that had a form attached to it in the documents tab instead of the correspondence tab; I only called and texted a client instead of calling, texting AND emailing them. Long story short I feel inadequate and stupid. I know I’m not stupid, but gosh do they make feel stupid. The icing on the cake is, I got written up today for being “disrespectful” and for “creating a toxic work environment”, this is because I had made a joke yesterday about jelly. Jelly had surgery on his foot the beginning of this month. He recently returned to the office but has been driven to work by his legal assistant since he can’t drive yet. I said to the legal assistant in a joking, playful manner that jelly was his passenger princess. That’s all I said. Apparently that pissed jelly off. I’ve heard jelly say far worse things, in a non joking manner. I was truly shocked to see how a man so rude could be so sensitive. Am I just not meant to be a paralegal? Is this what working for attorneys is like? I’m planning to quit soon, which makes me sad but at this point I’m over the bs. Also excuse my typos and thank you for reading this far.