Assisting those in legal need
Paralegals perform administrative tasks such working with documents, photocopying, and numbering of pages. But those are just the mundane activities. Sandy Hutchens notes that paralegals also interview witnesses and draft legal documents. They are an important part of the legal system.
Two types of law
There are two major types of law practiced in North America: corporate law and litigation law. Corporate law deals mainly with the activities of companies, which may be looking to merge or acquire new entities, and need lawyers to prepare all the paperwork; litigation is law that more people are familiar with: civil law which involves one party suing another.
Corporate paralegals put together record sets among other things. These are large binders filled with primary documents connected with particular business deals. If a corporation buys a shopping mall then a record set of the deal will include the contract to purchase the mall, leases of tenants of the mall, and the many tax forms associated with the purchase.