Paralegal has become the most common career path to the legal operations field, according to the recently released Legal Operations Compensation Survey from the software provider Brightflag.

According to the study, 31.3% of legal ops employees were paralegals. That's nearly double the No. 2 career background, attorney, which came in at 17.5%.

Kevin Cohn, Brightflag's chief customer officer, said chief legal officers and general counsel are increasingly recognizing the importance of legal ops, and they're looking to trusted internal candidates to fill its jobs.