One technique is to rate each lawyer's use of paralegals as a part of his or her performance evaluation. In addition, paralegals should be trained to be constantly reminding attorneys of the types of tasks they can handle and also to keep after lawyers to delegate more work to them. Attorneys themselves should be trained on how to properly utilize paralegals. This training, of course, could be one of the responsibilities of the paralegal coordinator. Without question, one of the chief reasons for the underutilization of paralegals is that there may be too many lawyers competing for the work, including too many inexperienced lawyers.
Attorneys often compete with legal assistants for available work.
For example, paralegals often tell us that there are too many lawyers on staff. Where that is the case, it would be more productive and cost effective to utilize paralegals more and lawyers less. The attorneys themselves will often agree. When pressed, it is not unusual for them to tell us that the office does not have enough work to keep everyone busy. And many times attorneys tell us that they would not prefer having a junior lawyer to assist them rather than a paralegal.