Paralegals & Legal Secretaries

Professional Profile: Haley Odom, Paralegal & Blogger

By Lynne DeVenny

Employer: Slack & Davis, LLP, Austin, Texas

Years of Paralegal Experience: 8

Specialty Areas: Commercial Litigation, Aviation

Career Highlight: Taking a firm from WordPerfect to Word and then paperless. It was invigorating.

Paralegal Practice Tip: Learn Excel. Excel does so much more than crunch numbers for you. Indexing production, working on time lines, putting together important facts, creating charts and graphs ? it?s all so easy in Excel. Learn it, use it, love it.

Favorite Internet Resource: I cannot tell you how often I use PDFmyURL.com day to day. It?s wonderful and extremely easy. http://www.pdfmyurl.com/

Also, I really do love http://www.dictionary.com/.

Favorite Legal Software: KDocs. Hands down. https://www.kdocs.net/Logon.asp

Do you use social media resources, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or blogs, for career and/or case development?

• LinkedIn: I am on LinkedIn, but I have never found great success with it as far as career development is concerned. It has been good for staying in touch, even loosely, to former colleagues.
• Twitter: I'm @HaleyOdom on Twitter, and am a big fan of Twitter! Not only has it been a perfect medium for me to get general information on any topic I could come up with, it has been a facilitator of excellent relationships. How else would I have come across @ExpertParalegal! Twitter has also been helpful in some of my cases, which is nice.
• Blogs: I also have a blog, Haley Lobs Law Bomb (http://haleyodom.wordpress.com/). My blog has been great for me personally. My writing is getting better, and I?m getting more comfortable putting my thoughts in writing.
  

Fun Fact: I turned down a scholarship in engineering to get a degree in English. English is harder than chemistry.

Favorite Quote: ?If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you?ll never learn.? ~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Professional Links:

www.twitter.com/HaleyOdom

www.haleyodom.wordpress.com

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/haley-odom/6/792/2a9

__________________

Awww, Haley, thanks for the Twitter mention. It's how I met you - and a lot of other terrific legal professionals nationwide. And I love Dictionary.com and Ray Bradbury, too.

Readers, I hope you'll add Haley's blog to that RSS feed reader I know you've set up by now. Also, if any of you would be willing to do a professional profile and share a little about what you do, as well as a few of your favorite professional tools and tips, please email me at lynne.devenny@gmail.com.

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on June 22, 2010 (boomark / email).