As professional firms redesign who performs what fee-paying work, they create new occupational groups within their organizations. However, old assumptions about professionals status and careers can prove remarkably resilient.

Behind all the hype about AI, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that professional firms have been parsing professional work for many years, always trying to discover the most efficient and effective way to deliver the best quality work at the highest sustainable profit. Work once undertaken almost exclusively by qualified professionals is increasingly shared among a range of specialists, technicians, and other occupational groups, such as paraprofessionals.

In a recent publication for the Journal of Management Studies, co-authored with Dr Stefanie Gustafsson, we examine what happens inside firms when boundaries around professional work begin to shift. Based on more than 80 interviews carried out by Stefanie, we analyse the implications of the growing use of paralegals in elite UK law firms. We identify a somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon with relevance for professional organisations more generally.

Illusion of progression

We find that the distinction between occupational groups can become surprisingly blurred in everyday work. Paralegals sometimes perform work equivalent to trainees or even qualified junior lawyers, manage projects, work directly with clients, and spend time embedded in teams of lawyers.

Yet, while some boundaries are blurred between professionals and paraprofessionals, others are affirmed. Access to developmental work and important client relationships remain unequal; some groups are physically segregated in different parts of the same building or restricted to lower-cost centres; and recruitment systems continue to privilege the qualifications and characteristics associated with conventional routes into the profession.

We call this contradiction the “illusion of progression”. The experience of doing increasingly professional work, combined with apparent opportunities for advancement, creates a credible expectation of progression, which the firms encourage by holding out the hope of obtain a training contract. Yet the chances of actually crossing the boundary into professional status remain limited.

We find that, when paraprofessionals fail to gain admission to a full professional training contract, they blame themselves for being inadequate and work even harder to progress. They continue to believe that, by working “like” a professional, they will one day have a chance to receive a professional qualification.

As one paralegal explains, “It's so close now.” For some, giving up on the prospect of qualification feels like “giving up” altogether. Another describes the experience more starkly: “I've been here over three years, I'm stuck here.”

Organisational consequences of redesigning professional work

This is where our study's findings connect with much broader themes arising from my ongoing analysis of structural change across the professions, and the unintended organizational consequences of firms' decisions.

Our research shows how easily contradictory signals can emerges from perfectly routine decisions about staffing, recruitment, work allocation, location, and career development. Paraprofessionals can be sustained by the expectation of progression even while they are experiencing immobility.

This illusion of progression has very real consequences for the people caught up within it. As one interviewee asks: “Are we just stuck here forever in limbo?”. Another describes “waiting for your career to get started”. Perhaps most tellingly, one paralegal concludes: “The firm are having their cake and eating it. They're getting all the benefits of having a lawyer ... but I'm not getting the career progression here.”

 Our academic article, published in the Journal of Management Studies, is called “Co-constructing the illusion of progression: How boundary blurring and affirming reproduce social exclusion in elite professions.”