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From property dealing to estate administration
If you choose the legal secretary specialty, you come close to legal work without being a lawyer yourself. You support the lawyers in getting cases to flow — from the first meeting with a client to the last signature — and you learn a variety of case types that are repeated in most law offices.
Much of the work at many law offices concerns property transactions. Here you prepare and clean up documents such as deeds, and you help get the transaction registered — that is, officially recorded, so the change of ownership is valid and can be seen by others. Registration requires precision: an error in a deed or a wrong date can delay an entire residential sale.
Law office secretaries often work with estate management and lighter case processing within family law. These are cases where people are often in a vulnerable situation, and where your ability to communicate calmly and respectfully is as important as your administrative precision. Wills and powers of attorney are also among the document types you will encounter.
Other typical tasks include case handling for collection matters and forced auctions as well as gathering information from municipalities and other authorities for use in a case. If the office works with lawsuits or criminal cases, you help keep track of the case's documents, correspondence, and the many deadlines that run during a lawsuit.
Alongside the legal case types most law secretaries also solve common office tasks: rewriting of minutes and contracts telephone coverage preparation for meetings and ongoing client contact. You are often the client's first contact with the office and your ability to act professionally and discreetly sets the tone for the entire customer experience.
Because you handle such personal and sensitive matters — deaths, divorces, criminal cases — confidentiality carries extra weight in this specialty. What you see in a client case stays in the office.
“A lawyer is only as good as the case management behind them — and it's often the legal secretary who holds the threads together.”