Krystal Gilstrap

The best advice I ever received came from a former supervisor who had read The One Minute Manager book series. She explained that when you have a problem presented to you, you need to take one minute to determine whether it's something you can do immediately, and if not, figure out if there's going to be an easy solution or if it needs to be delegated. If not, you need to approach the person and say, 'Hey, I hear your problem, I understand your problem, I will be looking into it.' This was hugely helpful in the way that I manage my tasks from day to day, because in my role as a paralegal, I've got probably 40 different attorneys at any given point during the day asking me for something to be done, asking me questions, advice, all of that, and it can be very overwhelming. So from the standpoint of just taking that one minute to think about what it is that they're asking, and then going to them and being like, 'Hey, I hear what you're saying. I can have an answer to you by this time if I've got another priority.' That is probably one of the best things that I ever learned. I haven't actually read the books - it's on my wish list - but the fact that this woman shared that with me was tremendously helpful, and I have lived by it ever since.

One of the biggest challenges in my current role is making sure that everybody is consistent. I like to live by the 'hit by the bus' rule - you never know what's gonna happen to you. You could literally be hit by a bus on your way to work or on your way home, and yeah, your employer is gonna be sad you're gone, but they still have a job to do, so they're gonna expect somebody to pick up where you left off. If you're not prepared for that moment, it's gonna create a lot of frustration, a lot of heartache later on down the road. I've been on the bad side of that several times, where people have up and quit or they've been fired, and you've got to pick up where they left off and figure out what's going on, and it can be very time-consuming, very frustrating. So for my team, I've been trying as best I can to try and make sure they understand that, and try and work towards that uniformity and consistency so that we don't have that problem in the future, but it's definitely an ongoing project.

I care a lot about the details - as a paralegal, the details matter. I've seen successful paralegals in my field who value the details, and I see the ones that don't. The ones that don't, yeah, they can get the job done, but it's not necessarily done in a way that the attorneys are happy with, or they just accept it as it is because they don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. My value is that I pay attention to the details. I want to be thorough in everything. I double, triple check myself. You know, the old adage, measure twice, cut once - that's kind of how I do a lot of my projects. A lot of the things that I do as a paralegal is very, very detail-oriented, and the attorneys just need everything to work as it should, when it needs to work. If it doesn't work the way it's supposed to work when it needs to work, it causes them to get flustered, it distracts them - they could be in the middle of a very intense cross-examination of a witness in court, and if your exhibits aren't running the way that they're supposed to be running, or they're not marked correctly, or they're not loaded properly, that's going to create some issues. It's really important to me that I support my attorneys in a way where that doesn't become an issue. From a professional standpoint, I live strongly by the belief that it's not about me, it's about my team.