PLGL-1200-30I

10/3/15

Law Office Interview

I decided to do a telephone interview with a family friend in Austin, Texas.

She didn’t have much time to really talk so I didn’t get as much information as I

would have liked. She owns her own law firm, which is a real estate law firm in a

more urban Texas market. She doesn’t have any other attorneys on her staff, but she

does have paralegals that do help her.

Anonymous attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate and then

went on to Saint Mary’s for law school. She has been an attorney for twenty plus

years. The law firm where she works is a private practice law firm. She mainly

works from home so she doesn’t have many employees. She has two paralegals that

work for her and help her gather sufficient evidence on the backgrounds of the real

estate properties that she is looking to help out.

Anonymous is an attorney and what she does is she will have real estate

plans and contracts brought to her by clients and they will ask her to look over them

and see if there is anything in them that needs to be changed or taken out. She will

go over the contracts and will give her best professional and legal advice on what

the client should do in that situation. Sometimes it is best for her to take the case on

herself and she will end up presenting the contracts on behalf of her clients. Other

times she will just give advice on what is best.

She occasionally will have clients come in who are about to lose their

properties and her firm will buy out the properties and help the client so they can

keep it, but she will now own it. It has become their specialty in dealing with real

estate contracts and making sure that her clients are getting the best deals possible

and that nothing is hidden in the fine print. Lately the firm has been finding

properties and buying them out then fixing them up and flipping them for profit. Her

husband is a big name contractor in that area as well so he does a lot of the fixing for

her, which allows her clients and also her firm to get better deals on many of the

products.

The paralegals in her firm play a large role in finding many of these

properties and presenting them to her. Many times the paralegals will do a lot of the

work by going through the contracts and finding anything that needs to be changed

or rephrased for their clients benefit. The paralegals are also in charge of keeping

things organized and well prepared so when she makes her presentation to a client

or another attorney it looks very professional and that she is ready for it. Although

the paralegals do a lot of work for her she also takes on a lot of it as well. She said on

average she works 15 hour days and sometimes more. Many of these hours are from

home.

With the little time that we both had to talk I felt as if it was hard to

really get a feel for what exactly goes on in her firm. She does a little bit of

everything from what I understood. Knowing her I know that she does a lot to help

her clients especially the ones who are in danger of losing their properties. Her firm

has been successful thus far and from what it sounded like is that she really enjoyed

how things were run and how her paralegals took on a lot of work.