Top 12 Personal Injury Paralegal Skills to Put on Your Resume

In personal injury practice, a paralegal’s resume has to punch through the noise. Precision on the law. Calm, human touch with clients. Clean process, relentless follow‑through. Spotlight the skills that show you can dig, organize, persuade, and deliver.

Personal Injury Paralegal Skills

1. LexisNexis
2. Westlaw
3. Case Management
4. Document Drafting
5. E-Discovery
6. Trial Preparation
7. Medical Records Analysis
8. Negotiation
9. Client Intake
10. Time Management
11. Microsoft Office
12. PACER

1. LexisNexis

LexisNexis is a comprehensive legal research and analytics platform with deep libraries of case law, statutes, regulations, treatises, and practical guidance. It helps personal injury paralegals research liability, damages, and procedure, and support attorneys with strong authorities and clean citations.

Why It's Important

It concentrates authoritative sources in one place, speeds up research, and anchors motions, demand packages, and strategy in verified, current law.

How to Improve LexisNexis Skills

1. Search like a pro: Mix natural language and Boolean. Use filters, segments, and post-search refining to narrow fast.

2. Validate everything: Shepard’s signals to confirm good law and find stronger, newer authorities.

3. Lean on Practical Guidance: Checklists, clauses, and how‑to notes tailored to personal injury save time and reduce errors.

4. Use legal analytics: Lex Machina insights on judges, venues, and parties can sharpen valuation and timing.

5. Track developments: Set alerts on issues, cases, and topics so updates come to you.

6. Train regularly: Short refresher webinars and help center walkthroughs keep you current on new features.

7. Connect to your workflow: Pair research with your CRM or matter system (e.g., InterAction or similar) to keep notes, cites, and tasks together.

How to Display LexisNexis Skills on Your Resume

2. Westlaw

Westlaw is a legal research platform offering case law, statutes, secondary sources, jury verdicts, and litigation analytics. For personal injury work, it’s a backbone for proving liability, sizing damages, and checking procedural landmines.

Why It's Important

It accelerates research, confirms authorities, and surfaces patterns in outcomes that guide settlement posture and trial prep.

How to Improve Westlaw Skills

1. KeyCite every time: Verify that cases and statutes are still good law and see how courts treat them.

2. Dial in by practice area: Use Personal Injury filters, headnotes, and key numbers to zero in quickly.

3. Mine secondary sources: Treatises and ALR articles often point to the exact lines you need.

4. Use Verdicts & Settlements: Benchmark value ranges for injuries, venues, and defendants.

5. Litigation Analytics: Spot judge tendencies and motion outcomes to steer strategy.

6. Organize and alert: Folders per matter, saved searches, and alerts keep research live and tidy.

7. Keep sharpening: Take quick certification or update sessions so new tools don’t pass you by.

How to Display Westlaw Skills on Your Resume

3. Case Management

Case management means corralling every moving part of a personal injury matter—intake to settlement or verdict. Documents, deadlines, medicals, liens, tasks, experts, calendaring, and communication, all tracked cleanly and moved forward.

Why It's Important

Miss a deadline, lose a record, or bury a demand date and the case limps. Tight case management keeps momentum and maximizes value.

How to Improve Case Management Skills

1. Adopt the right platform: Use purpose-built tools (e.g., Clio, MyCase, Filevine, Neos/Needles, SmartAdvocate) and standardize matter templates.

2. Build checklists: Intake, treatment tracking, discovery, mediation, and trial—repeatable lists slash errors.

3. Calendar like a hawk: Dual-docket critical dates (SOLs, disclosures, discovery cutoffs) with reminders and backups.

4. Communicate predictably: Scheduled client updates, summary emails, and a clear point of contact.

5. Delegate with clarity: Assign owners, due dates, and definitions of done. Review weekly. Adjust workload early.

6. Retrospectives: After key milestones, capture what worked and what bogged down. Update templates immediately.

How to Display Case Management Skills on Your Resume

4. Document Drafting

Document drafting covers complaints, discovery, subpoenas, medical record requests, authorizations, demands, motions, settlement agreements, and tidy correspondence—always in compliance with local rules and formatting.

Why It's Important

Clear, accurate, rule‑compliant drafting turns facts into leverage. It frames the story, preserves rights, and nudges the other side toward yes.

How to Improve Document Drafting Skills

1. Know the rules: Local rules, standing orders, service quirks, word limits, exhibits—no surprises.

2. Write plainly: Short sentences. Concrete verbs. Defined terms. Headings that map the argument.

3. Template smartly: Maintain vetted templates with bracketed variables and scenario notes. Refresh after each matter.

4. Cite clean: Consistent citation style and validation. No stale authorities.

5. Peer review: Fast red‑team passes catch tone, gaps, and typos. Read aloud for flow.

6. Ethics first: Accuracy over advocacy. No overstatement. Facts sourced and checked.

How to Display Document Drafting Skills on Your Resume

5. E-Discovery

E-Discovery means identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information—emails, texts, social media, EHR data, photos, metadata. In PI cases, that can decide liability and damages.

Why It's Important

Digital breadcrumbs prove notice, timelines, and impact. Mismanaged ESI risks sanctions or, worse, lost leverage.

How to Improve E-Discovery Skills

1. Lock down preservation: Issue legal holds early. Coordinate with clients and vendors to prevent spoliation.

2. Know the rules: FRCP 26 and 34, ESI protocols, proportionality, privilege logs, clawback agreements.

3. Use capable tools: Review platforms with search, threading, deduplication, and analytics keep volume sane.

4. Structure your review: Tagging schemes, coding guidelines, and QC checks speed consistency.

5. Team with IT: Source data maps, device inventories, and export methods before deadlines bite.

6. Keep learning: Short ACEDS-style trainings and vendor updates maintain your edge.

How to Display E-Discovery Skills on Your Resume

6. Trial Preparation

Trial prep for a PI paralegal means assembling exhibits, drafting and organizing witness lists, exhibit lists, and demonstratives, coordinating subpoenas and logistics, building trial notebooks, and assisting with motions and pretrial filings—always under attorney supervision and aligned with courtroom rules.

Why It's Important

Court days are unforgiving. Smooth prep turns chaos into rhythm and lets counsel focus on persuasion, not paper-chasing.

How to Improve Trial Preparation Skills

1. Timeline everything: Create tight chronologies of events, treatment, and communications; cross-reference to exhibits.

2. Master the binder: Tabs for pleadings, orders, witness materials, exhibits, voir dire, motions in limine, jury instructions.

3. Exhibit control: Label early, track custodians, and rehearse admitting foundations.

4. Witness readiness: Schedule prep, logistics, and availability. Provide clean outlines and documents.

5. War-room systems: Shared file structure, naming conventions, and a quick-retrieval index on every laptop.

6. Dry runs: Mock direct/cross, tech checks, and last‑mile courtroom procedure walkthroughs.

How to Display Trial Preparation Skills on Your Resume

7. Medical Records Analysis

Medical records analysis is the disciplined review of EHRs, provider notes, imaging, billing, and codes to map injury, causation, treatment, and prognosis. Gaps, priors, comorbidities—everything that changes case value.

Why It's Important

Damages live here. The story of pain, function, costs, and future care must be precise, consistent, and documented.

How to Improve Medical Records Analysis Skills

1. Build a chronology: Date, provider, complaint, findings, diagnostics, treatment, restrictions, and follow‑ups.

2. Know the language: Common anatomy, ICD‑10 and CPT codes, radiology terms, typical recovery curves.

3. Standardize requests: HIPAA‑compliant forms, narrowly tailored scopes, and tracking logs for each provider.

4. Spot red flags: Priors, degenerative findings, inconsistent complaints, noncompliance, and causal breaks.

5. Use experts wisely: Nurse consultants or IME reviewers for complex injuries or long‑tail treatment.

How to Display Medical Records Analysis Skills on Your Resume

8. Negotiation

Negotiation in PI means sharpening liability and damages into a settlement the client will accept and the carrier will pay—ideally without trial.

Why It's Important

Strong negotiations save time and cost, reduce risk, and often yield faster, cleaner outcomes for injured clients.

How to Improve Negotiation Skills

1. Prepare relentlessly: Liability proof, treatment chronology, specials, liens, future care, comparative fault scenarios.

2. Value with evidence: Use verdict/settlement data, venue patterns, and medical support to anchor numbers.

3. Listen for interests: Find constraints, authority limits, and what actually moves the other side.

4. Communicate crisply: Short demand letters with exhibits that persuade without puffery. Timely, professional follow‑ups.

5. Have a BATNA: Know your walk‑away and your path to suit, mediation, or trial if talks stall.

How to Display Negotiation Skills on Your Resume

9. Client Intake

Client intake captures facts, signs the engagement, clears conflicts, and sets expectations. You gather incident details, treatment status, coverage, witnesses, and documents—then open the matter and start the clock.

Why It's Important

A clean intake sets tone and trajectory. It protects deadlines, avoids misfires, and signals professionalism from day one.

How to Improve Client Intake Skills

1. Pre‑screen efficiently: Short web or phone forms before consults to confirm venue, SOL, and basic viability.

2. Use modern intake tools: Systems like Clio Grow, Lawmatics, or similar platforms automate forms, e‑sign, and follow‑ups.

3. Be human: Clear explanations, empathetic tone, and realistic timelines. Document every promise.

4. Organize instantly: Create the matter, checklist the next steps, and calendar critical dates at once.

5. Feedback loop: Ask new clients about the experience. Patch friction points right away.

How to Display Client Intake Skills on Your Resume

10. Time Management

Time management is triage and tempo: prioritizing tasks, blocking focus time, and meeting every deadline across many files.

Why It's Important

Personal injury work stacks tasks and clocks. The only way through is structure—so cases keep moving and nothing perishes.

How to Improve Time Management Skills

1. Prioritize with intent: Urgent vs. important. SOLs and court deadlines first, then items that unlock downstream work.

2. Plan the day: 10‑minute morning plan, time blocks for deep work, batches for calls and admin.

3. Break big tasks: Turn “draft motion” into bite‑size steps with mini‑deadlines.

4. Reduce noise: Quiet hours, filtered inboxes, and notifications off during drafting.

5. Docket and double‑docket: Redundant calendars and reminders for anything court‑touched.

6. Review weekly: Scan every active matter. Update statuses, nudge bottlenecks, reprioritize.

How to Display Time Management Skills on Your Resume

11. Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office (now Microsoft 365) is your everyday toolkit: Word for drafting, Excel for numbers and lists, Outlook for communications and calendars, PowerPoint for visuals, and OneNote/Teams/SharePoint or OneDrive for collaboration and storage.

Why It's Important

Most firms run on it. Mastery unlocks speed, consistency, and clean collaboration across the team and with clients.

How to Improve Microsoft Office Skills

1. Word like a lawyer: Styles, headings, automatic TOCs, cross‑references, and compare/track changes.

2. Excel with purpose: Tables, filters, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, PivotTables for medical expenses, liens, and deadlines.

3. Outlook rules: Rules, categories, and quick steps to tame volume and surface what’s critical.

4. OneNote notebooks: Matter‑based tabs for facts, issues, and meeting notes, linked back to files.

5. Templates everywhere: Letterheads, discovery shells, demand frameworks—uniform and ready.

6. Automate the repetitive: Quick Parts, content controls, and simple scripts or macros for routine inserts.

7. Share smart: Versioned documents in SharePoint or OneDrive, with permissions and naming conventions.

How to Display Microsoft Office Skills on Your Resume

12. PACER

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) provides online access to federal dockets, filings, and case information. It pairs with CM/ECF for filing and tracking activity.

Why It's Important

It’s the official record. You monitor deadlines, pull filings instantly, and research parties, cases, and outcomes.

How to Improve PACER Skills

1. Know your tools: PACER Case Locator, court‑specific portals, and NextGen CM/ECF credentials.

2. Search smarter: Party names, ranges, nature‑of‑suit codes, and targeted date windows to cut noise.

3. Organize downloads: Save once, name consistently, store centrally. Avoid repeat charges.

4. Set monitors: Save searches and check for new docket activity on a schedule; assign ownership for each matter.

5. Integrate: Sync documents into your DMS or case system (e.g., CaseMap, Clio, or similar) for team access.

6. Mind the fees: Track costs and note the quarterly fee waiver threshold; report PACER spend per matter.

7. Enhance where needed: Consider helper tools that automate fetching and distribution of new filings.

How to Display PACER Skills on Your Resume