1. According to the American Bar Association, a paralegal (or legal assistant) is defined as "a person qualified by education, training or work experience who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation, governmental agency or other entity who performs specifically delegated substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible."

2. As a paralegal, you will perform administrative tasks such as filing, retrieving and organizing documents, photocopying, and the ever-popular numbering of pages.

3. Depending on the employer, when taking a break from hole-punching, you may get to participate in more glamorous tasks such as interviewing witnesses or drafting legal documents.

4. As a corporate paralegal (you work in a firm that mostly oversees the merging or acquisition of companies), you will put together record sets. These are large binders filled with primary documents associated with particular business deals.

5. As a litigation paralegal (you work in a firm where people go to court and sue other people), you will handle the documents associated with trials. You'll spend hours making sure that the pages of all these documents are identical in each set. You'll also do a bunch of indexing -- describing the documents in a computer database, putting papers in boxes, and labeling them, so that attorneys can find them later.

SoYouWanna know more? Check out our full-length article SYW be a paralegal?