This was my first conference. This was my first vision of what I knew people saw and thought represented paralegals and legal assistants. The people at the registration table looked nothing like me. I remember walking in, seeing this exact visual and thinking to myself “I’m not staying here”. I took this photo back in 2019. That was a problem to me. My initial reason for snapping this photo was to send it to my coworkers at the time. I later realized the real reason I took that photo was because it was my visual roadmap of the wall I needed to tear down and rebuild. Going back to that day, I remember the problem becoming immediately apparent. This is not an accurate visual of people in the industry. They looked nothing like me. They did not dress like me. Our hair was not the same and don’t get me wrong, differences are what makes us all unique. I embrace differences. However, if I felt underrepresented, I knew others did too. Luckily, I did build one great bond with one other paralegal attending the conference as a first timer and she felt the same way as me. The sad part was , that conference consisted of many attendees. The representation or lack of was prominent. Immediately I tried to accumulate all the possible reasons why. Did the organization lack good marketing? Did they purposely target one demographic? Was it a financial reason? All these thoughts ran through my mind. I started to do what any paralegal would do. I started doing some research. 
To bring you back just a little, 2019 was the year in which RF Legal or the idea of it started to fully grow. The seed was planted way earlier but I needed to do my due diligence right? So I attended this conference with a different hat but with my eyes on the main prize of starting my own business. To bring us back to that day, that same night I started researching paralegal conferences. I mean, I had the time because I was not interested in attending any of the events that night. Let me tell you, The amount of tabs I had open was unimaginable. The amount of ways I tried using keywords was exhausting. My results constantly came back to the same two conference which included the one I was at. That again was a problem for me. I started to change the keywords and moved away from the word “paralegal”. “Lawyer conferences” “law conferences” “annual legal summits” you name it.
Once RF Legal began to take root I circled back to this issue. As you can see, that visual lived rent free in my mind like a scary video that kept replaying. I needed answers. One of my first clients as a freelance paralegal would often say he planned to send me to a local legal conference. You know, to help me market my services. I wasn’t scared but i knew the conferences he referred to were mainly attorney based. Now, I know what you are thinking, isn’t that where you want to go as a freelance paralegal to build clientele and the answer is “it depends”.
As a new business owner, as a paralegal with a mission of breaking that same visual stereotype that you see in the photo above, I wanted to attend a conference that also allowed me to be around “my people”. To gain insight and knowledge about things centered around the paralegal world.
Okay, now let me fast forward a little, after Covid, once the world opened back up, I continued my search. I came across conferences geared towards trial lawyers. Now i had more confidence, I emailed the organizers to see if they had a paralegal section and the response I often got was pretty much no but paralegals are always welcome. Well, ok, thanks but I also want a paralegal focused conference. So I changed gears and started thinking, if I can’t find one, I need to be the one that gets the word out that paralegals need, or deserve rather, a place at your conference. The good news is, we’re heading in the right direction. More attorney based conferences are noticing the importance of incorporating paralegals. I mean, simply imagine all the additional registration fees they are missing out on.
Presently, I’m happy to say, we are showing up. I’m advocating for us. I’m in the trenches fighting this battle for us. Because of my experiences I wanted to create a place in which you can go to find a list of paralegal friendly conferences. Indeed I would be lying if I said our work was done. It’s far from done but in advocating for paralegals, one of my goals is to make your life easier. Below is a list of paralegal friendly conferences that you might be interested in and likely see me at. If that’s the case make sure to say hi.
