The paralegal profession did not begin as a career path. It began as a cost-reduction proposal. On August 6, 1968, the ABA House of Delegates adopted a resolution that created what became the Special Committee on Lay Assistants for Lawyers. The reasoning was written directly into the text, and it is worth reading slowly, because it is the same argument being made about AI in 2026.
“Recognizing that freeing a lawyer from tedious and routine detail thus conserving his time and energy for truly legal problems will enable him to render his professional services to more people, thereby making legal services more fully available to the public.”
Read the logic on its own terms. The bar was not trying to invent a job. It was trying to solve an access problem. Lawyers were spending their capacity on detail work that did not require a law degree, which made legal services scarce and expensive. Move the detail to someone else, the theory went, and the lawyer serves more people at a lower price.
The word did not exist yet
There was no term for the role the resolution described. The early literature calls them lay assistants and legal paraprofessionals. “Paralegal” did not come into common use until around 1971, four years after “paramedic” entered the language on the same borrowed prefix. The profession had a purpose before it had a name, which tells you the purpose came first.
Then the role became billable
Here is where the plan met the business model. The work moved off the lawyer's desk exactly as intended. But the firm still had one way of converting effort into revenue, so the newly relocated work went back onto the invoice under a different name and a lower rate.
The courts eventually made this explicit. In Missouri v. Jenkins (1989), the Supreme Court held that a reasonable attorney's fee under federal fee-shifting statutes includes paralegal time billed at prevailing market rates rather than at the firm's cost of employing them. That decision was a win for the profession and for the economics of civil rights litigation. It also settled something quietly: a role created to absorb non-billable detail was now, formally, a revenue line.
Which means the incentive to make the detail disappear went away. When tedious work is a cost, you eliminate it. When it is billable, you staff it. Those are opposite instincts, and the profession has been running the second one for fifty-eight years.
The detail kept arriving
The other thing nobody in 1968 could have priced in: the volume of routine detail did not hold steady. E-filing, e-billing, client outside counsel guidelines, matter-management systems, conflicts checks, document management, trust accounting, cybersecurity attestations. Every one of these was sold as an efficiency. Every one of them also generated a new category of structured, repetitive, non-legal work that has to be done exactly right by someone.
And every hour of it still has to land on a person. Today roughly 376,200 people in the United States work as paralegals and legal assistants, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is where it lands.
Why adding a person never closes the gap
The 1968 resolution made a structural error that is easy to see in hindsight and easy to repeat. It moved work from an expensive person to a less expensive person. It did not change the fact that the work scaled with a headcount.
Any fix of that shape has a ceiling built into it. If handling twice the matters requires twice the coordinators, then growth is a hiring problem, the cost of the detail work never actually falls, and the savings show up as a slightly cheaper hour rather than as a structurally cheaper service. This is the same reason firms today can buy six pieces of legal tech and still find that their support team is the constraint on growth.
The version that works is the one where the repeatable loop runs without a person in it, and the person keeps the exceptions, the judgment, and the client contact. Not a cheaper seat. No seat.
Fifty-eight years later
We built Caddi to finish the sentence the ABA wrote in 1968: free a lawyer from tedious and routine detail, conserving that time and energy for truly legal problems. The difference is not ambition, it is where the work goes. In 1968 the only place to put it was another person. Now it can go somewhere that does not need a headcount, does not turn over, and does not quietly become billable.
The rest of the series
Four times a profession ran out of people to absorb its own routine work, and what actually ended each one.
- IBM Exists Because the Census Could Not Finish Counting. The 1880 census took until 1887 to tabulate by hand. The machine built to clear that backlog became the computer industry.
- Who Decided Six Minutes?. One managing partner started timesheets around 1920 to run his firm better. Then the measurement became the price.
- The Year the Stock Exchange Closed on Wednesdays. For most of 1968 the busiest market on earth shut one day a week because the back office could not clear the paper.