[quote=flu]BG, with all due respect, most Americans do not have “superior” English skills relative to a some of the foreigners…For one thing, grammar is seldomly taught rigorously in U.S. schools these days, and second the reason why the entire legal system exists is because the majority of Americans lack the comprehension and English skills that are necessary to understand those pesky legal documents an attorney drafts up. Heavens forbid, if they actually wrote things in simple terms that average J6P could understand, they wouldn’t need to be charging $350+/hr for their words or $150/hr for a paralegal to photocopy a document. On the other hand, you have a foreign body of relatively well college educated foreigners that has taken English, gone through training,etc, I wouldn’t doubt their comprehension and ability to write to be better than J6p….

And let’s face it, while there are some good paralegals, most of them are not lawyer “like” in any way….. I was dealing with my attorney for a few months, and I have to say her paralegal was a complete moron….I ended up correcting her English and sending the documents back to her for her to “fix” on the final document…Of course, her screwups meant my attorney charged me $150/hr to fix. Nice huh? And no, I guarantee that paralegal was not “foreign” in any way..[/quote]

I’m sorry your attorney did not have a good paralegal, flu. LOTS of paralegals do virtually everything a lawyer does . . . except sign legal documents, take depositions and appear in court. A good one will just prepare and then give an attorney all the legal filings to sign, the attorney will sign it, the paralegal will file/serve it and the attorney will argue it and win! However, there is MUCH more to the job than that.

flu, if I might ask, what would you say the “age group” was of your attorney’s paralegal? Time and time again, I have found that the publicly-educated younger age group (under age 45 or so) has NOT received a very good education in English, spelling, sentence structure and composition, even if a “native” speaker. However, most attorneys, if given the choice, will hire a younger candidate over an older, more experienced one, due to the cost disparity of health insurance premiums. It doesn’t seem to faze them that a younger candidate typically wastes more time during the business day (w/cell phone & gadgets), does not know the “ins and outs” of the local system, and takes more leave of every kind.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of public schools were VERY good prior to about 1978.

I still don’t buy that an Indian in India can do this job. They couldn’t possibly understand all the local nuances of the job within each jurisdiction they are “performing” legal tasks nor could they understand how to determine whether a particular case is useful to a particular application. There is just too much English here to understand for a non-Native, ESPECIALLY one who has never even been to the US.

As you said, legal documents are not even easy for J6P, a USA native, to understand.