Document management. Diary management. Drafting support. Assisting with disclosure and liaising with counsel. Every line of that was accurate when somebody wrote it, and it is still accurate, and none of it is the job.
Start with the honest part, because the trade already knows it and pretending otherwise wastes your time. First-pass review has been going for years, since long before any of the current noise. Software that ranks documents by how likely they are to matter turned out to work well enough, and it cost a fraction of a room full of people. What’s arrived since then takes the next layer. A serviceable summary of a long transcript. A chronology built off the dates in the file. A first draft of the letter that follows the template, the index, the schedule, the routine instrument. Checking the citations. Working out the deadline from the rule.
Some of that is a relief and some of it isn’t, because a fair amount of it was the billable part, and a job that loses its billable hours has a problem whatever else is true about it.
So what’s left isn’t a task at all. It’s a location.
Take the day it goes wrong. Counsel is on their feet, a witness has just said something that doesn’t match a document, and the room has about the length of one sentence to decide what happens next. A hand comes back without a head turning. Whatever your jurisdiction calls the paginated set everybody in the room works from, you built it. You know the letter is in there. You know it’s the copy with the earlier date, because the argument about which date was right went on and on. The page arrives in the hand. Nobody says anything about it afterward.
That is not retrieval. Retrieval is the part a machine now does better than any of us, and if the question had come in writing with time to answer it, nobody would need you. The speed comes from somewhere else. You have been inside that file since the start, so the document, its wording, the fight about it and the other side’s copy with the wrong date are already in your head. Nothing is being searched. It’s being held. And the knowledge on its own is only a memo that somebody reads later. What makes it worth paying for is that it’s in the room while the room is still moving.
And that is worth saying carefully, because it cuts both ways. The months in the file are exactly what’s being taken away. If the review is done by something else, the person standing in the room on the day has a thinner picture of what’s in there, and nobody in the trade has worked out yet what that does. I can’t either. I suspect the answer is not comfortable and I’d rather say that than pretend the residue is safe.
The trial is the sharp version, but the ordinary version is everywhere in your week. A witness turns up early and has to be met at reception, kept away from the others, given a glass of water. Somebody has to notice that this one is about to come apart, and say so to counsel before they reach the door. A client arrives without an appointment because the letter frightened them. Completion runs late and needs a person holding the signature pages and the room. On the day of the deadline the filing system goes down, so a human being walks it over, and the woman on the counter knows your name.
None of that is written down anywhere as a duty. It happens because you were there.
A great deal of this trade now works from a kitchen table, and the sky did not fall. Bundles get built remotely. Hearings run on a video link, witnesses get met by nobody at all, and mostly it’s fine. If presence were doing the heavy lifting every day, none of that would have worked as well as it has. So the claim isn’t that you have to commute. It’s narrower. It’s that the work concentrates onto particular days and particular rooms, and on those days somebody has to already be there and already know, because a room moves at a speed that has no queue in it. You can’t summon that person. Whoever is present is the only candidate.
I don’t think this post has earned the right to be encouraging, so here is the part I dislike about your position. The title says assistant. You have been at the firm longer than the associate you are assisting, and you both know it, and neither of you says so. Pay follows titles, not work. And the firm can only see you through the parts of your week that leave a record, which are precisely the parts being taken out. The tasks that leave are the ones that were easy to see and easy to count. What’s left is real, and it is nearly invisible from head office, and those two facts have never sat comfortably together in any trade I’ve looked at.
The firms that work this out will pay for presence on purpose, and describe it properly, and stop calling it assistance. What that costs them is somebody who is not billing anything while nothing is happening, which is a harder line to defend on a budget than any of the ones being removed.
For a week, keep a note of every time somebody came and found you in person instead of writing it down. Note what they wanted and whether the answer existed anywhere in the file. That list is your actual job description. Now notice that you have never once put a single item from it on a timesheet.
