What my supervisor clearly doesn't understand is that it isn't a resume builder for the direction I've told him I want my career to go. You see, for the last 3.5 years, I have also being taking on the role of fraud investigator in addition to my paralegal duties related to fraud cases and discovered this is where my passion is. I even interviewed with my supervisor for the fraud investigator role a year and a half ago. And both I and the attorney I work closest with have had ongoing conversations with my supervisor about getting me officially into that investigator role. An investigator doesn't get called into trials to do administrative work. So no, this is not a resume builder for me.
Then as the trial got closer, the paralegal in my office who usually handles trials showed up in my office early one Monday morning and told me that he had talked to our supervisor and that he would be supervising me in my role as paralegal on this trial. He followed up with patronizing conversation after conversation in the days and weeks that followed. To fe fair, there were a couple key things I needed from him but the rest was just an unnecessary, condescending distraction. He even had the nerve to go to one of the other paralegals and ask her if she thought I was smart enough to handle this because I wasn't asking any questions.
In the meantime, I was pulled into a huge brief last week, on another case matter unrelated to fraud, that consumed so much of my time and added so much additional chaos to the chaos of preparing for a trial. This brief and the trial were by far the two biggest tasks for our division in the recent weeks and they both fell disproportionately on one attorney and on one support staff, me.
Fast forward to today, the day of the trial, I was in the elevator with the two attorneys on the case and they asked me why he was there. He had walked over with us but forgotten his ID so had run back to the office in that moment. I found it interesting that he had not actually been invited yet made time to attend the whole trial today.
My work managing exhibits both in paper and electronically went incredibly smoothly. I was called a superstar and people were impressed with my abilities. The intern was surprised to hear it was my first time given how well she thought I handled it all. And one of the attorneys said that now I will become the paralegal of choice, the one others ask for. And I kept getting asked how I felt about it all. They wanted me to feel like I had accomplished some big goal, checked off another check mark on my list of accomplishments, etc.
What none of them realized was how much the whole experience was convincing me how much I needed to leave this office.
There's a frustrating danger in being competent. I have experienced it in almost every job I have ever had even going back as far as my high school job at the state Department of Transportation. What I liked about my current role is that my funding source narrowed my job description. Even when we lost our investigator and I took on that role as well, I still could keep narrow the types of cases I worked. Only a couple of attorneys in the office ever truly got to see the quality of my work. I could hide in the office down the hall with easy access to the back staircase.
And it's hard to believe this truly was just about helping out during tough times when I think about how much time the normal trial paralegal had to bug me, patronize me, and then sit through the entire trial. He could have handled it himself in that time. So this wasn't about him being overworked. They just didn't want him to handle it. Maybe because the technology for displaying exhibits had changed and he uses his poor technology skills as an excuse to not learn new tools. Or maybe because he doesn't wear the hearing aids he needs forcing the attorneys to have to yell to get him to hear their directions (which is not ideal in a trial when often you don't want everyone in the courtroom to hear you). So they turned to someone they believed would be more competent even if it wasn't in her job description.
If I do manage to secure an investigator role in another district (whether that be in Atlanta or somewhere else), I will feel bad leaving the remaining attorney I work with on fraud cases. He has advocated for me, consistently shown a huge respect for me, considered me in the decisions that affect me, and treated me like an important member of our team. I can't say the same for my direct managers, overall leadership, and administration of the office. They had so many chances to do better by me and chose not to. I will not feel bad about leaving them.
So with an interview scheduled for next week and this trial behind, I'm ready to look forward with the realization that ultimately, my gain in a new opportunity will be a big loss to this office. Wow, that sounds familiar, me turning someone's inability to see my value into an opportunity of gain for me (and a loss for them).
Is that just the reality of life - that many people struggle to see the value in what is right in front of them? Or is there something specific about me that makes it easy for others to overlook my value?
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