Hello,
We recommend you to remove them before transforming HTML to DOCX.
This is using a regex such as;
$html = preg_replace('/<\\/?p(.|\\s)*?>/', '', $html);
or str_replace:
$tags = array('<p>', '</p>');
$html = str_replace($tags, '', $html);
You need to change these codes if there're other paragraphs you need to keep or lists are not added standalone but with more HTML.
You can also use DOCXPath to move contents after transforming the HTML, but the easiest solution is cleaning the HTML before being added.
Regards.