By Jaclyn Foster

I have always been slightly suspicious of the phrase “the best version of yourself.”

It sounds lovely in theory, of course. Inspirational, even. There is probably a woman somewhere on Pinterest drinking lemon water beneath the words as we speak. But every time I hear it, I picture this impossibly polished version of myself standing just slightly out of reach, waiting for me to finally get my act together so I can become her.

To be honest, I don’t know if I could handle her. She sounds exhausting.

She wakes up early every morning without feeling personally betrayed by the alarm clock. She is patient with her child and, perhaps even more impressively, her husband. She tends to every animal with the serene disposition of someone in a very tasteful farm commercial. She is focused at work, present with her friends, financially responsible, emotionally mature, physically healthy, spiritually grounded, and somehow remembers to switch the laundry before it smells strange enough that she has to wash it again.

I suppose I would love to meet her. She seems wonderful, and I am sure I could learn quite a bit from her. I just no longer believe she is the only version of me who deserves to be chased after.

There have been times in my life when I think I subconsciously treated personal growth like a long renovation project. Somewhere underneath the mess was the finished version of me, and if I could just develop enough discipline, accomplish enough, heal enough, learn enough, organize enough, and finally stop doing whatever ridiculous thing I had decided was currently wrong with me, I would eventually unveil her.

There she would be: finished.

Except life has never worked that way for me.

I have accomplished things I once thought would surely make me feel more certain of myself, only to discover that accomplishment tends to introduce you to an entirely new set of uncertainties. I have built things, left things, sold things, started over, changed directions, made decisions that looked wonderfully strategic in hindsight and others that were mostly held together by instinct and a glass (or two) of red wine.

I have had seasons where I felt completely aligned with where my life was going, followed almost immediately by seasons when I found myself wondering whether I had any idea what I was doing at all.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that becoming a stronger woman did not mean permanently shedding every weaker, messier, less impressive version of myself.

They kept coming with me.

I often receive messages from my followers on LinkedIn telling me I am such a huge inspiration to them, or asking me how I found the confidence and the knowledge to accomplish what I did with my business and career. What’s the secret sauce, Jaclyn?

What I should probably be telling them is I am still the woman who needs coffee before she can responsibly participate in society. I am still capable of becoming overwhelmed, questioning myself, getting impatient, missing something obvious, disappearing completely into a daydream about what my life might look like three years from now, and then realizing late in the afternoon that I have eaten essentially nothing because four double shots of espresso somehow convinced my body we had handled lunch.

I have changed direction in my career more than once. I have walked confidently into opportunities while simultaneously wondering whether someone might eventually discover that I was simply “winging it” as I went. I have experienced the strange combination of knowing I am very good at what I do while still having moments when I question whether I am doing the right thing at all.

For a long time, I think I viewed those contradictions as evidence that I had more work to do on myself.

Now I think they might simply be evidence that I am a person.

There are days when the patient, capable, focused version of me arrives early and stays for most of the day. She is fantastic. She handles difficult conversations gracefully, finishes what she starts, remembers appointments, drinks water, makes good decisions, and somehow feels completely capable of managing every corner of her life.

Sometimes she appears briefly around 10:30 in the morning, handles three very important things beautifully, and then leaves without explanation.

Other mornings, she opens her eyes absolutely convinced that she could build an airplane if someone gave her enough YouTube tutorials and a free Saturday.

Honestly? Sometimes she doesn’t show up at all.

I have learned to enjoy that woman when she shows up. What I am trying to stop doing is despising myself when she doesn’t. Because there are other versions of me who have carried this life too.

The tired version has still gotten children where they needed to go, fed animals, answered emails, kept commitments, and gotten through days when she did not feel particularly inspiring.

The scared version has made some of the biggest decisions of my life.

The uncertain version has walked into rooms she was not entirely convinced she belonged in and figured it out once she got there.

The frustrated version has finally admitted when something was no longer working.

The restless version has been responsible for some of the most important changes I have ever made because she refused to accept that the life in front of her was the only one available.

Even the version of me who has gotten something completely wrong has usually left behind information that the next version desperately needed.

That makes it difficult for me to label one of them “best.”

There is something appealing about believing that personal growth eventually turns us into one beautifully consistent person. It suggests that if we work hard enough on ourselves, we may eventually stop having bad days, strange seasons, emotional reactions, periods of doubt, and moments when we would very much prefer to climb back into bed and revisit the entire concept tomorrow.

There are seasons when career growth matters enormously to me, and I want to chase big opportunities, build something meaningful, make more money, become exceptionally good at my work, and see exactly how far I can take an idea. I know that part of myself well. She has built businesses, taken risks, reinvented things, and spent a truly unreasonable number of hours staring at a laptop because she could see something in her mind that did not exist yet.

There are also times when the things that feel important become quieter. I want to be home. I want my family around me. I want to notice what is happening in my own life while it is still happening. I want to sit outside longer than necessary, watch the seasons change, make dinner, fuss over animals, grow tomatoes, drink coffee before everyone wakes up, and remember that a meaningful life cannot possibly be measured entirely by what I accomplished professionally that quarter.

I am very uninterested in narrowing myself around what would be “the best” version.

I want room for contradiction.

I want to be ambitious without believing ambition has to consume me. I want to be deeply grateful for the life I have while still imagining what else might be possible. I want to be confident enough to acknowledge the things I do exceptionally well and humble enough to know that I can still make a spectacular mess of something occasionally. I want to be disciplined without turning my life into one enormous self-improvement assignment.

Most of all, I want to stop believing that every difficult season means I have somehow become a “better” version of myself.

Sometimes the woman who does not know exactly where she is going is simply between destinations.

Sometimes the woman who is questioning everything has finally become honest enough to question things that no longer fit.

Sometimes the woman who feels exhausted does not need a new morning routine, a better planner, or another podcast about optimizing her potential. Sometimes she needs sleep.

And sometimes the version of yourself you are least impressed with is quietly doing some of the most important work the later you will need.

Perhaps becoming is not the permanent arrival of our most impressive self. Perhaps it is learning how to remain honest, responsible, curious, and recognizable to ourselves through all the forms we take.

The tired self, the brave self, the uncertain self, the thriving self, the woman who knows exactly what she wants, and the woman who only knows that she cannot continue exactly as she has are not competing identities waiting for one of them to finally win.

They are one woman and one life in motion.

So take that, Pinterest lady.

By Jaclyn Foster

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One of the easiest ways to make a legal service business harder to run than it needs to be is to let every client determine how your work gets done.

At first, it usually does not feel like a problem. You have one client in Clio, another one sending assignments through email, and a third using MyCase. You are trying to be accommodating, so you adjust. You log into whatever system they use, figure out where they keep documents, learn how they name files, follow their internal communication preferences, and generally make yourself fit into the way their firm already operates.

Sometimes, that is exactly what you should be doing.

Other times, especially when you are selling a defined deliverable rather than ongoing integrated support, it can quietly destroy the efficiency you thought you were building into your business.

The distinction matters because there are two very different ways legal service providers tend to work with law firms, and they require different approaches to technology, client collaboration, and workflow.

In one model, you are providing ongoing support and becoming an extension of the law firm’s team. In the other, you are producing a defined result for the firm through a process that belongs to your business.

Those two services should not necessarily be managed the same way.

When You Are Part of the Firm’s Workflow

If you are providing ongoing paralegal or legal support, working inside the client’s systems often makes perfect sense.

Imagine that a law firm hires you for fifteen hours per week to assist with active litigation matters. You are monitoring deadlines, preparing routine pleadings, reviewing discovery, communicating with clients, updating case notes, requesting records, and handling whatever happens to come up within those matters.

The work itself is integrated into the life of the firm.

In that situation, it would be inefficient for the attorney to constantly export information from their practice management system just so you could work somewhere else. You need access to the case file, the communications, the documents, the calendar, and whatever other information the firm uses to manage those matters. If the firm operates in Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, Filevine, or another case management platform, being properly onboarded into that environment is usually part of providing the service.

That does not mean your entire business should live there.

You still need your own infrastructure for the client relationship itself. Your service agreement belongs to your business. Your invoicing and payment processes need to be managed. Your own timekeeping, client records, business documentation, and internal operations should not disappear simply because most of the actual legal work happens inside a client’s system.

The easiest way to think about this model is that you are entering the law firm’s operational environment because the service requires it, while still maintaining the business infrastructure necessary to manage the relationship from your side.

That changes when the thing you are selling is not ongoing participation in the firm’s workflow, but a clearly defined deliverable.

A Productized Service Needs a Repeatable Production Process

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A productized legal support service works differently.

Instead of saying, “I will support your firm for ten hours each week,” you might be selling an estate planning drafting package, a medical record chronology, a demand package, a discovery package, a document review service, or another defined body of work with an identifiable beginning and end.

The law firm provides the information you need. Your business processes that information. You deliver the completed work.

Once you are operating in that type of model, allowing every client to determine your internal workflow begins to create problems very quickly.

Suppose you sell the same demand package to five personal injury firms.

One firm wants you working completely inside Filevine. Another sends you documents through Dropbox. A third emails everything to you and expects questions by email. Another wants you to communicate with its case manager through Teams. The fifth law firm has a practice management platform you have never used before, so someone spends an hour showing you where everything is stored before you can even begin the work.

You may have sold the same service five times, but operationally, you are delivering five different services.

That matters because productized services make money through repeatability.

You know what information needs to come in, what steps need to happen internally, who is responsible for each part of the work, what quality-control process occurs before delivery, and how the finished product gets back to the client. The more predictable that process becomes, the easier it is to price accurately, train other people, improve turnaround time, measure profitability, and eventually scale.

If every new client requires you to rebuild the production process around their software and habits, much of that advantage disappears.

I Learned This the Messy Way

When I first began scaling my own virtual paralegal business, I thought the obvious next step was to hire people and begin delegating portions of the client work to them.

In theory, it made sense. I would continue managing the client relationship while another paralegal worked behind the scenes. The client could keep working primarily with me, and I could increase capacity without completely changing how the relationship functioned.

The problem was that the work was still living inside the clients’ systems.

If something was assigned to me through a client’s case management platform, I had to gather the information my team member needed, transfer the assignment to that person, answer questions, keep track of the deadline, review the finished work, and then put everything back into the client’s system.

For one or two clients, that can be manageable.

As the number of attorneys grew, it became increasingly difficult to keep track of what had been delegated, where every document lived, which person was responsible for which deadline, and what still needed to be returned to the client. I talked about this during a recent Paralegals in Business Society Live Q&A because the problem was not really the number of people working for me. The difficulty increased as the number of separate client environments increased.

At one point, I remember feeling completely overwhelmed in the mornings because I was no longer simply responsible for my own deadlines. I was responsible for making sure other people understood the assignments, had the information they needed, completed the work on time, and got everything back through whatever workflow that individual law firm happened to use.

Hiring help had technically increased my capacity, but the way I had structured the workflow had also created an entirely new layer of administrative work.

Eventually, I had to change the model.

In certain client relationships, the better answer was to introduce the paralegal directly to the firm and allow that person to work within the client’s environment. In other circumstances, the work needed to become much more clearly scoped so that my business could receive what it needed, complete the work through our own internal process, and deliver a finished product back to the attorney.

Those are two fundamentally different operating models, and recognizing which one you are actually running makes almost every technology decision easier.

Decide Where the Work Lives Before You Choose the Software

Legal businesses sometimes approach technology backward.

They look for software first and then try to force their workflow into it.

It is much more useful to start with the service itself.

If your service requires you to participate continuously in the management of a law firm’s matters, then the firm’s practice management system will likely remain the primary place where that work happens. Your job is to create an efficient onboarding process that gets you the appropriate access while keeping your own business administration organized separately.

If you are producing a defined deliverable, however, you should ask whether you truly need to operate inside every client’s technology stack.

In many cases, the better model is to create one environment that your business controls.

The client provides the required information through your process. Your team receives it in the same place each time. Assignments move through the same internal stages. Questions, revisions, approvals, and documentation are handled through a consistent workflow. Once the work is complete, the finished deliverable is returned to the law firm.

That is also where client collaboration becomes much more important.

You do not want to create a black box where the attorney sends you documents and hears nothing until something comes back two weeks later. Clients still need a simple way to communicate, provide additional information, review work when appropriate, and understand where the project stands.

They simply should not have to control your entire production environment in order to do it.

Standardization Is What Protects Your Margin

The financial impact of all of this is easy to underestimate.

If you charge a flat fee for a deliverable and one client’s workflow requires an extra hour of administrative work, another requires three follow-up emails to locate missing documents, and a third requires someone on your team to learn an entirely new case management system, those costs are coming out of your margin.

You can increase your price, of course, but pricing cannot solve unlimited operational variation.

The more repeatable the service becomes, the more accurately you can understand what it actually costs you to produce.

That becomes especially important when other people are involved.

If you want a team member to help produce estate plans, discovery responses, demand packages, or another repeatable legal work product, the process needs to be teachable. You should be able to document how the work enters your business, where it goes next, what information is required, who reviews it, and how it is ultimately delivered.

During the Q&A, I described this type of model almost like a production environment. The client provides what is needed for the work, the team follows an established process internally, and the finished product is delivered back out. That is very different from having every member of your team jump from one law firm’s system to another throughout the day.

That distinction is where a platform such as LawOffice.AI becomes particularly useful for a legal service business.

Rather than using separate tools for project management, internal collaboration, timekeeping, invoicing, document exchange, and client communication, you can build the operational side of your business around one environment and invite clients into the portions of the workflow where their participation is actually needed.

The goal is not to force every law firm to abandon the technology it already uses.

The goal is to determine which technology should govern the work you are actually responsible for producing.

Your Service Model Should Dictate the Workflow

There is no universal rule that freelance paralegals should always work inside a client’s systems or that legal service businesses should always require clients to use their own.

The right answer depends on what you have promised to deliver.

If you are functioning as an ongoing extension of the law firm’s internal team, entering the firm’s systems is often part of doing the job well.

If you are selling a defined product or deliverable, your ability to create a consistent internal production process becomes part of the value of the service itself.

The important thing is to make that decision intentionally.

As legal service businesses grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to compensate for a poorly designed workflow with more people. Adding another paralegal does not automatically create scalability if that person also has to navigate six different client environments, six different communication methods, and six different ways of receiving assignments.

Before you add another client, another service, or another person to the team, look at where your work actually lives and ask whether the workflow matches the service you are selling.

If it does not, fixing that may do more for your capacity and profitability than hiring anyone else.

Build the workflow your legal service business actually needs.

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By Jaclyn Foster · Free chapter from Paralegals Should Be Millionaires

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From my experience working with paralegals, law firms, and attorneys nationwide, I see that they are desperate for better training tools. And when I say desperate, I don’t mean it lightly. I’ve been in the room with attorneys who’ve asked me, “Jaclyn, do you know anyone who can teach my staff how to handle intake efficiently?”

Just last week, an attorney asked me, “Do you know a paralegal who offers a course on understanding the ins and outs of trademark prosecution?”

The demand for practical, targeted training spans every corner of the legal profession. Aspiring paralegals are looking for affordable, actionable alternatives to expensive certification programs. They want to know how to stand out, land that first interview, and make an immediate impact. Entry-level paralegals are desperate for resources that teach them real-world skills—how to navigate discovery, manage multiple deadlines, or even craft a resume that gets noticed. Experienced paralegals want to refine their expertise, stay ahead of industry trends, and increase their value in the marketplace by adding cross-practice area knowledge. Attorneys and law firm owners want efficient ways to train and develop their teams without sacrificing valuable billable hours.

This need isn’t just speculation—it’s backed by data. Globally, e-learning is projected to become a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. Yes, trillion, with a “T.” People are hungry for online learning. They want convenience, accessibility, and targeted solutions they can consume at their own pace. They want practical answers to their specific problems, not vague theories or academic fluff.

Yet, as always, the legal industry is dragging its feet.

While other industries have fully embraced the power of online courses created by real people within the profession, the legal world is still cautiously tiptoeing into the water. It’s not that the demand isn’t there; the supply hasn’t caught up.

And that, right there, is the opportunity.

Thinking back on your career, if you’ve ever wished someone had taught you how to manage intake workflows, navigate the complexities of discovery, get through paralegal school with good grades, or survive your first year as a paralegal without feeling like an imposter, you already understand the need. But what if you could be the one to fill that gap for someone else? Imagine building a course—a digital product that packages your expertise into something accessible, repeatable, and scalable. Not only does it help others, but it also becomes a powerful business in its own right. That’s the beauty of course creation.

The legal industry is hungry for change. Law firms are desperate for solutions. And you, with your unique knowledge and experience, are perfectly positioned to meet that demand.

The Stories Behind the Demand

I once worked with a law firm with a revolving door of employees. High turnover doesn’t even begin to describe it. The firm couldn’t find trained paralegals in the local market, so they would bring people in from entirely unrelated industries—think retail managers, bank tellers, even baristas—and toss them into the deep end, expecting them to morph into legal assistants or paralegals magically. There was no formal training. No onboarding processes. Nothing. It was a classic “sink or swim” situation, and most people sank.

One hire after another would leave, disillusioned and overwhelmed, while the firm kept wondering why it couldn’t retain staff. The financial impact on the firm was never considered as it should have been, and it was a financial and emotionally draining loss for everyone involved. If only they had a course—a simple, actionable training tool tailored to develop entry-level hires with no legal background—things could have been so different.

I believe there’s value in encouraging people to problem-solve on their own. It’s an essential skill in the legal field. But there’s a difference between encouraging independence and leaving someone wholly stranded. At that firm, there was no safety net. People were floundering, not because they weren’t capable, but because they weren’t set up for success in the first place.

I remember one paralegal above me who refused to help me when I was new. She even emailed an attorney, calling me an “idiot” for not knowing basic terms. I was crushed. I was young, inexperienced, and desperately trying to figure out what “estate” meant in the context of probate law, or how to spell “interrogatories.” That lack of support and structure wasn’t just demoralizing—it was a direct contributor to the firm’s turnover problem.

That story isn’t unique. It happens in law firms across the country. The lack of accessible, practical training isn’t just inconvenient—it’s costing law firms money, time, and talent.

E-learning isn’t just about addressing isolated problems; it’s part of a larger shift in how people learn. People and businesses want convenience. They want solutions they can access on their own time, at their own pace, and within their budgets. A well-designed course allows someone to log in at 2 a.m. in their pajamas and start learning immediately.

This shift is already happening in other industries. Take marketing, for example. You can find online courses on everything from running social media ads to building a personal brand. Tech is another field that’s embraced e-learning. These industries understand that targeted, actionable training is the future—and they’re thriving because of it.

The legal industry? It’s still catching up. But the pandemic forced firms to rethink how they operate, and online training is becoming a bigger part of that conversation. Attorneys see the value in investing in their teams’ development—not just for compliance or CLE credits, but for actual, day-to-day effectiveness.

I can’t tell you how many attorneys would happily pay thousands per year for a paralegal course if it meant their staff would become more efficient and productive or they could onboard and train new hires quicker without sacrificing their billable hours. I can’t tell you how often I have had paralegals from my community ask me if I can direct them to courses for niche practice areas.

The willingness to invest is there. The need is there. What’s missing, in many cases, is the supply.

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The Possibilities for Legal Courses

What makes course creation so exciting is its flexibility. A legal course doesn’t have to be a massive, comprehensive program. In fact, some of the most successful courses I’ve seen are incredibly specific.

A micro-course on how to e-file in federal court could save someone hours of frustration—and trust me, I speak from experience. My very first client in my freelance paralegal business needed a motion drafted and filed in a federal district court. At the time, my experience was limited to lower state courts and a handful of appellate filings. Federal e-filing? It was completely uncharted territory for me.

What followed were two agonizing hours of navigating not one but two different systems in the federal court process. The frustration was almost unbearable. My flat-fee profit margin? It was disappearing faster than my six-year-old son could devour a bag of peanut butter cups. I was losing money with every passing minute, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t find any step-by-step tutorials, guides, or resources to help me figure it out. I was completely on my own.

Now, I’ll admit this with the risk of you laughing at me: I’m no stranger to technology. I consider myself competent. But at that moment, I would have gladly handed over $100 for a course that could have walked me through the process step-by-step and spared me the headache. That’s the value of targeted, actionable courses. They’re not just about learning—they’re about solving real problems when you need it most.

Maybe you have something bigger in mind, like an entire start-to-finish course for creating and managing legal case timelines or a training program for law firms on intake management that could be handed to every new hire, streamlining operations from day one.

The possibilities are endless because the legal field is so vast. You don’t have to create something for everyone—you just need to create something for someone.

Addressing the Skeptics

Whenever I talk about course creation, I hear the same objection repeatedly: “That won’t work in the legal industry.”

Let me be blunt: that’s nonsense. I’ve seen people build six-figure monthly incomes with courses on nail design, gardening, and even magic tricks. If those niches can thrive, so can independent legal education. I’ve done it myself, and I know other course creators in the legal space who are doing it. The demand is real, and the market is wide open.

But here’s the special part: it’s not just about the money. Course creation is about solving problems and providing value. It’s about taking what you know—your expertise, your experience, your hard-earned lessons—and sharing it in a way that helps others.

The legal field is notoriously slow to adopt new ideas. I’ve worked with firms that are still tracking statute of limitations deadlines in wall calendars and sticky notes. I’ve placed new hires in law firms that still slap a 50-pound employee handbook in their laps on their first day. I’ve seen firms clinging to outdated VPN servers as recently as 2019.

But the tide is turning. The pandemic forced law firms to adapt, and many are embracing technology in ways they never would have considered before. Online training is no longer a novelty—it’s becoming a necessity.

Attorneys want to onboard new hires without sacrificing billable hours. They want their teams to be skilled, efficient, and confident. Paralegals want to grow in their careers without spending tens of thousands of dollars on formal education.

This is your moment. The demand for legal courses is real, and the supply is still catching up. Whether you want to create a small, niche course or build an entire catalog of training programs, the opportunity is there.

Online learning isn’t just a trend—it’s a shift. It’s changing how people approach education, skill-building, and career development. The legal industry may be behind the curve, but that’s what makes this opportunity so exciting. You’re not just creating a course—you’re filling a gap that desperately needs to be filled.

Want the rest of the chapter sequence?The free chapter continues inside Paralegals Should Be Millionaires, including the income potential, work, scalability, and realities of a course-based business.

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I’m Not an Expert - Blah, Blah, Blah...

You might be reading this and thinking, "Sure, Jaclyn, but I'm not an expert in anything." Or maybe, "I don't know if anyone would actually want to learn from me." Let me stop you right there. You don't need to know everything. You just need to know something valuable that fills a gap in someone else's knowledge. One of the biggest misconceptions about course creation is that you must tackle a huge, all-encompassing topic to make an impact. But the truth is that specificity can be a superpower.

A micro-course on how to e-file in federal court might seem narrow at first glance, but for the paralegal struggling to figure it out, that course is a lifeline. It saves them time, reduces their frustration, and makes them more effective at their job. Or think about a course on resume building for aspiring paralegals. It's not flashy, but it's practical. It gives people the tools they need to land interviews and kickstart their careers. That's transformative.

Specific courses solve specific problems, and people are willing to pay for solutions. You don't need to know how to lose 100 pounds to teach someone how to lose 10. Let that sink in. When it comes to creating a course, the same principle applies. Maybe you're thinking, I only have experience in pre-litigation, not trial work, so how could I create a course? Well, you don't need to teach everything from start to finish. You don't need to be an expert in every phase of the legal process to create something meaningful.

Think about it this way: many people don't need or want the complete roadmap to trial yet. First, they need to know how to navigate pre-litigation successfully. For those starting in the field, your knowledge about pre-litigation mastery could be precisely what they need. It doesn't have to be a massive course that covers everything (which would be more expensive)—sometimes, it's about focusing on one specific step and helping people overcome that next hurdle.

A paralegal who learns to manage discovery correctly saves their firm time and money. An aspiring paralegal who gets their resume in top shape lands a job faster. A paralegal student who learns how to survive their first year of school and make the Dean's List doesn't need to know how to be an expert trial paralegal yet.

None of those are small wins—they're significant milestones that can change someone's career. And that's the beauty of it: you don't need to have expertise in everything, just enough to help others through the challenges they're facing.

Your knowledge, no matter how specific or seemingly small, has the power to create real transformation for someone else. Whether it's how to handle a particular part of a case, be more effective with your time, or excel in a specific part of the legal process, that's valuable.

I get it, though—imposter syndrome sneaks in and whispers, who are you to teach this? But let me counter with this: Who are you not to teach it? You've already overcome challenges, gained experience, and found solutions that worked for you. Why not turn that into something that helps others?

That's what you're creating for your audience. You're giving them a shortcut. You're saving them the time, energy, and frustration of having to figure it all out on their own. The people who need your course aren't looking for perfection. They're looking for guidance. They're not sitting there scrutinizing your credentials or wondering if you're a world-renowned expert. They just want help.

And if you can help them—even in a tiny area of their career—you've already succeeded.

The legal industry is ripe for this kind of targeted, actionable learning. Most training programs are either too broad or too academic. They don't address the day-to-day realities of working in the field. That's where your course comes in. You're bridging the gap between theory and practice, giving people tools they can use immediately.

Here's another doubt I get asked all the time: "What if someone already created a course on my topic?" My response? Good. That means there's demand for it. But no one else can teach it like you can. Your brand, personality, delivery, teaching style, stories, voice, and way of breaking things down are the magic magnet that connects you with your people. Even if a hundred courses exist on the same topic, yours will connect with someone in a way none of the others could. And that's exactly why it's needed out there.

Think about your favorite restaurants. There are probably dozens of places in your area that serve pizza, but you still have a favorite spot. Why? Because it offers something unique to your preferences. It could be the crust, the sauce, or the atmosphere. Whatever it is, it keeps you coming back. It's not always about "better" or "worse." A restaurant can receive 200 five-star reviews and 200 one-star reviews simultaneously. No two people experience the same thing in the exact same way.

Your course is no different. There's room for multiple courses on the same topic because every creator brings something different to the table that will resonate with a specific audience.

So, let go of the idea that you must be everything to everyone. You don't need to know it all. You simply need to focus on the next step, and that's where your course comes in. There's someone out there right now who needs exactly what you know and is waiting for you to share it.

This is the core of course creation: understanding that your expertise, no matter how specific, is invaluable. Your course doesn't have to be overwhelming or all-encompassing; it just needs to solve a real problem for your audience. Trust me, when you create with that mindset, your course will not only resonate—it will change lives.

In the next chapters of this section, we're going to break this all down:

• What does income potential look like for a course creator?
• What does the work look like when you run a course-based business?
• What does it take to succeed in this space?
• Can you scale a course business?

We will cover all of it—step by step. For now, please sit with this truth: the knowledge you already have in your head is valuable. It's more valuable than you probably realize. And someone out there is waiting for exactly what you have to offer.

Paralegals Should Be Millionaires.

A bold, honest, and practical roadmap for paralegals ready to redefine their worth, build real income, and create careers with more freedom, ownership, and possibility. Available in print, Kindle, and Audible.

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By Jaclyn Foster

There is something about August that always feels a little bit like a reset.

If you have kids, you are probably starting to see school supply lists, back-to-school emails, fall sports schedules, and all the other signs that summer is very quickly coming to an end. If you do not have kids, you probably still feel it. Vacations are wrapping up, the days are getting a little shorter, stores are inexplicably putting pumpkins and skeletons out when it is still 85 degrees outside. Work starts to feel more normal again after the weird summer cycle of people constantly being out of the office.

It is not quite fall, but it is close enough that you start thinking about what the rest of the year is going to look like.

For some people, that means getting back into a routine. For others, it means realizing that another season has somehow passed and they are still thinking about the same career change they were thinking about six months ago.

If starting a freelance paralegal business has been sitting somewhere in the back of your mind, you may be in that exact place.

You are interested. You have thought about what you could charge. You have probably wondered whether attorneys would actually hire you. Maybe you have even had attorneys tell you they would. But for one reason or another, you are not ready to leave your job.

That reason could be financial. Maybe you need the health insurance or your household depends heavily on your income and quitting without a predictable replacement would be irresponsible. Perhaps you want more money in savings first or you have a bonus coming later this year that you would be crazy to walk away from.

Your hesitation could also be personal. You might like your job well enough that you are not ready to leave without knowing exactly what you are walking toward. You may have young children, aging parents, a spouse with variable income, debt you are trying to pay down, or simply a lower tolerance for financial uncertainty than someone else does.

There can also be employment-related considerations. Some paralegals have agreements with their employers that restrict outside work or create other limitations they need to understand before they begin taking freelance clients. (PS: Those are situations where you need to review your own agreements and seek legal advice when necessary, rather than assuming what you can or cannot do)

Whatever the reason, “I am not ready to quit yet” does not have to mean “there is nothing I can do yet.”

In fact, there is a tremendous amount of work that can be done before you ever collect a dollar from your first freelance client.

First, figure out what you are actually trying to replace.

Before you think about logos, LLCs, websites, or LinkedIn posts, sit down and determine what your actual personal financial requirements are.

What does your household need from you every month? What benefits are you currently receiving through employment that you would have to replace? What would health insurance cost? What do you need to account for in taxes? How much savings would make you comfortable? What expenses would change if you were working independently?

Do not let health insurance be the mystery number.Mitchell Underwood of The Health Advocate helps independent professionals understand individual and family health coverage options before they make the leap.

Explore Health Coverage →

You are trying to identify your bottom line.

That number gives you something much more useful to work backward from than a vague goal of “I want to make six figures.”

If your current salary is $80,000, for example, you may discover that your initial business goal is not to immediately build an $80,000 business. Your first milestone might be creating enough recurring client work to cover the amount your household actually needs from you while you continue building from there.

Freelance pricing also changes the equation. If you are appropriately pricing your services as an independent professional, you do not necessarily need forty billable client hours every week to replace what you were earning as an employee. In the Paralegals in Business Society Live Q&A Session that inspired this article, I talked about how someone might find that twenty or twenty-five hours of properly priced recurring client work gets them much closer to their former salary than they initially expected.

There are taxes, expenses, benefits, nonbillable time, and plenty of other things that have to be calculated into that equation, of course. The point is simply that you need your numbers before you can determine what “ready” looks like.

Then figure out what business you are actually building.

This is another thing you can do long before you are ready to leave employment.

Who do you want to work with? I do not mean “attorneys.” That is not specific enough.

Do you want to support solo attorneys? Small firms? Growing firms with several attorneys? Do you want to work in litigation, estate planning, probate, family law, personal injury, immigration, or another practice area? Are you trying to become someone’s fractional right-hand paralegal, or would you rather offer more defined, project-based services?

What work are you genuinely good at? What work do you never want to do again? What kinds of attorneys do you work well with? What kinds of firms are most likely to have enough work to need you, but not enough work to justify another full-time employee?

These questions matter because the answer affects almost everything else you build.

Your services affect your pricing. Your ideal client affects your marketing. Your delivery model affects the software you need. Your long-term goals affect whether you are building something centered completely around your own billable hours or something you may eventually want other people to help you deliver.

You do not need every detail figured out before you begin, because your business will absolutely change once real clients start interacting with it. Mine certainly did.

But you should have a direction.

Do the boring business work while you still have a paycheck.

Everyone wants to jump immediately to building a website and getting clients because that is the exciting part, but there is quite a bit of business housekeeping that has to happen somewhere along the way.

If you already know you are serious about eventually freelancing, this is a great time to start researching it.

Look into business names and whether the one you want is available. Research entity formation and talk with the appropriate professionals about what makes sense for your situation. Learn about business insurance. Understand what bookkeeping might look like. Research business banking. Start thinking about your service agreement and how you will handle invoicing and payment terms.

You should also spend time understanding any state-specific rules that may affect how you operate or market your services.

In the live Q&A, I talked about separating these decisions into different buckets because otherwise “starting a business” becomes one giant, overwhelming task. There are personal considerations, business strategy considerations, and then the less glamorous business logistics such as entities, insurance, contracts, and administration.

Handle them one at a time.

You do not need to spend three weeks trying to become an expert on every possible LLC tax election before you are allowed to think about what services you want to offer.

Make the list. Start working through it.

Build your marketing foundation before you desperately need it.

One of the hardest times to figure out marketing is when you suddenly need money.

That is when people start making strange LinkedIn posts announcing that they have immediate availability, throwing together websites overnight, sending generic messages to every attorney they have ever met, and accepting work that does not remotely fit the business they actually wanted to build.

There is a much better way to approach it.

While you are still in the preparation stage, start building the infrastructure you will eventually use to market yourself.

Update your LinkedIn profile so it accurately reflects your expertise. Think through how you will explain what you do. Write the basic language for your website. Determine what information someone needs before they schedule a call with you. Create a simple discovery-call process. Start outlining what a proposal or follow-up email might look like.

You can also become much more intentional about understanding the market you plan to serve.

If you eventually plan to use LinkedIn for direct outreach, learn how to search for the attorneys you would want to reach. Understand how Sales Navigator works if you intend to use it. Figure out what your filters would be. Learn how to identify good prospects rather than simply collecting every attorney email address you can find.

In the Q&A, one of my suggestions to a paralegal preparing for a future transition was to do as much of this groundwork as possible before the moment came when she actually needed clients. Direct outreach can work extremely well, but doing it thoughtfully is time-consuming.

You do not want your first day of independence to also be the first day you start wondering who you should contact. Make that list, and make it huge.

Prepare your launch before you launch.

There is an important distinction here.

Preparing to market a business and actively soliciting clients are not necessarily the same thing, and what you can appropriately do while you are employed depends on your individual circumstances and any agreements you have with your employer.

This is not advice to sneak around an employment agreement, take competing work, contact your employer’s clients, or violate any policies.

If there are contractual restrictions involved, understand them.

What I am encouraging you to do is prepare.

Know what your marketing strategy will be when the time comes, which types of firms you will target, what you are going to say, how many people you plan to reach out to each week, how you are going to follow up, where you are going to show up online, what happens when someone says, “Yes, I am interested.”

There is a big difference between leaving your job and thinking, “Okay…now how do I find a client?” and leaving your job with the entire machine built and ready to turn on.

That preparation buys you time when time suddenly matters a lot.

Give yourself a runway instead of waiting for courage.

I think sometimes we talk about entrepreneurship as though everyone eventually reaches a magical point where they suddenly feel brave enough to quit.

What I have learned is most people ever feel that way. There will probably always be another reason you could wait.

You could save another $10,000, wait until after the holidays, or wait until your kids finish the school year. You could wait until your annual review, until your spouse gets a raise. You could wait until your job becomes absolutely unbearable.

Some of those reasons are very legitimate. Some are fear wearing a responsible-looking outfit. You have to figure out which is which.

The nice thing is that you do not have to make that decision today. August can simply be the month you start getting serious.

Maybe by September you understand your numbers.

By October, you have your business model mapped out.

By November, you have researched the legal and financial logistics and spoken with the professionals you need to speak with.

By the end of the year, your LinkedIn profile, website copy, service offerings, pricing strategy, discovery process, and marketing plan are ready.

Then perhaps the December 31st countdown into the New Year is your moment.

Or maybe it is March.

Maybe you realize along the way that you do not want to leave your job at all and would rather build something different later.

That is okay, too.

The goal is not to pressure yourself into quitting. The goal is to stop treating the day you leave your job as the day your business begins. Your business can begin much earlier than that.

You can begin thinking like a business owner, researching like a business owner, planning like a business owner, and building the infrastructure of a business long before you are depending on that business to pay your mortgage.

Then, when your circumstances finally line up and you decide you are ready to make the leap, you are not standing at the edge wondering where to start.

You already did.

Planning your exit? Price health coverage before you guess.

Mitchell Underwood, The Health Advocate, helps paralegal business owners understand health-insurance options outside traditional employment before they build the number into their exit plan.

Explore health coverage →

By Jaclyn Foster

When I first started subcontracting in 2018, I remember being genuinely shocked that I could find remote work with law firms.

Not because freelance paralegals were brand new. They weren’t. Paralegals had been independently supporting attorneys for decades, and I have met people who were doing this kind of work back in the 1990s. What felt different at the time was how difficult it was to figure out how anyone had actually made it work.

There was no obvious roadmap. There was no large community of people openly talking about pricing, contracts, finding clients, managing scope, handling difficult attorneys, hiring subcontractors, or figuring out when it was finally safe to leave a traditional job. The people who had successfully built something seemed almost like the lucky few who had stumbled into the right relationships and figured everything else out along the way.

And, frankly, they were not exactly publishing the playbook.

A lot has changed since then.

The legal industry itself has evolved rapidly. Remote work is no longer some strange arrangement that requires explaining. Small law firms are increasingly comfortable building teams that do not all sit inside the same physical office, and the conversation around legal staffing has expanded well beyond the traditional choice between hiring another full-time employee or simply doing more work yourself.

Alongside that shift, something else has happened that I think is equally important: paralegals have started talking to each other about business.

The Information Gap Is Finally Closing

Attorneys have had this for years.

There are masterminds, coaching programs, conferences, Facebook groups, podcasts, consultants, peer groups, books, and entire communities built around helping attorneys grow law firms. Law firm owners openly discuss intake, pricing, profitability, hiring, marketing, delegation, technology, and scaling.

Paralegals who wanted to build businesses historically had very little of that infrastructure.

That created a strange environment where talented legal professionals could have ten or twenty years of experience handling complex matters and still feel completely lost when they tried to turn those skills into a business. Knowing how to be an exceptional paralegal does not automatically teach you how to identify an ideal client, price your services profitably, run a discovery call, create boundaries around scope, market yourself, collect invoices, or decide whether bringing another person into the business actually makes financial sense.

Those are business-owner skills, and they have to be learned like anything else.

One PIBS member described exactly that experience when he told me that he had thought about starting his own paralegal business for years, but without direction he would have been “wandering aimlessly.” What changed for him was having an actual process that showed him what to work on and in what order.

That matters because I think one of the biggest barriers for paralegals interested in freelancing has never been whether they are capable of doing the work. It is figuring out what to do with that capability.

There Is Still a Reality Check Involved

I also do not want the growing visibility of freelance paralegal businesses to create the opposite misconception.

This is not easy money.

Opening an LLC, creating a LinkedIn page, and announcing that you are accepting clients does not suddenly create a profitable business. You still have to find attorneys who need what you offer, explain why they should hire you, price the work appropriately, deliver consistently, manage client expectations, and continue marketing even when you would much rather spend your time doing paralegal work.

There are uncomfortable parts of building a business that no amount of encouragement can eliminate.

There will probably be discovery calls that go nowhere. You may price something incorrectly and realize later that you underestimated the amount of work involved. You will eventually meet a client who tests every boundary you thought you had established. There are taxes, insurance, contracts, software, bookkeeping, and all of the other unexciting pieces of owning a legitimate business.

The difference today is that you do not have to experience every one of those lessons completely alone.

Inside PIBS, I have watched members share the things that worked, the things that absolutely did not work, and all of the awkward middle stages that rarely make it into polished entrepreneurial success stories. One member recently shared that within her first two months she had landed one large client and a couple of smaller ones. Another celebrated getting her first discovery call and leaving it with a request for a proposal and follow-up meeting. Someone else joined thinking about how to get a business started and, only a few months later, was interviewing a potential teammate.

Those results are exciting, but what interests me even more is what happens between them.

It is someone posting a question before sending a proposal because they are unsure about their pricing. It is another business owner explaining how they handled a similar client situation. It is a paralegal who is still employed quietly learning and preparing because she is not ready to make a transition yet. It is someone admitting that imposter syndrome is kicking in and having other people remind her that she actually knows what she is doing.

That is what was largely missing when I stumbled into this world.

We Are Building Our Own Business Community Now

When I created The Paralegals in Business Society, I did not want it to become another place that simply told paralegals they were capable of more.

I already believe that.

What I wanted was a place where the conversation could move beyond inspiration and into the actual mechanics of building something: what to do first, how to find clients, how to think about pricing, what changes when you hire someone, how to structure services, and what happens when the business you started begins becoming something larger than you originally imagined.

One member told me that PIBS helped her begin thinking “bigger” and “more intentionally” while taking her own ideas and experience more seriously. Another said that starting a practice can feel isolating and terrifying, but having both practical guidance and a community behind her made her feel far more prepared for the transition.

I think that is where this industry is headed.

Independent paralegal businesses are no longer some mythical corner of the profession occupied by a handful of people who somehow figured out the secret. There are paralegals building solo freelance practices, specialized service companies, small teams, agencies, and businesses designed around specific legal deliverables.

Not every paralegal will want that path, nor should they. There are extraordinary careers to be built inside law firms, corporations, government, legal technology companies, and countless other places.

But for the paralegal who has quietly wondered whether building something of their own is actually possible, the answer is no longer hidden behind a handful of closed doors.

There are people doing it.

More importantly, they are finally talking to each other.

Paralegals in business are not an anomaly anymore.

Join the community built for paralegals turning legal skill into independent businesses—with the Pathway, Power Hours, the training vault, practical resources, partner benefits, and people who understand exactly what you are building.

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