Law Department Management Blog
At a consulting client, the paralegals and the secretaries in the different practice groups report directly to the lawyer heading the group. One of them, overseeing a dozen or more lawyers, has more than 20 such staff reports!
Inefficient is the mildest term for this misuse of senior lawyer time.
Paralegals ought to report to the lawyers they support directly, not to a higher level lawyer. Secretaries ought to take day-to-day direction from the lawyers they support (and from paralegals working for those lawyers, by the way), but should report to the Administrator for purposes of evaluations, vacation clearance, workload distribution, development and other purposes. [See my post today on the changing distribution between paralegals and secretaries.]