Lawyer’s Right Hand

A gentle reader writes:

At 53, can I successfully begin a career as a legal secretary? I have heard that law is one profession that exhibits a very low level of age discrimination. I possess 25+ years of varying degrees in office administration. Over the past 6 years, I have been a Human Resources manager with PHR certification.

If your answer is yes, would you suggest obtaining a degree for a legal secretary or would a certificate program be sufficient? Any recommendation for a learning institution? Also, is there a certification for a legal secretary that would be applicable?

The short answer is no, 53 is definitely not too old to become a legal secretary. It’s true that there is little if any age discrimination in this field. The main reason for this is that legal secretaries aren’t like new BBA graduates: There isn’t a bumper crop of them coming into the market every year. There’s a serious shortage of younger legal secretaries (I’m past 40 and one of the youngest in a large office), and so firms can’t afford to discriminate in favor of the fresh-faced. (I’ve never really blogged on why younger people aren’t becoming legal secretaries, but it boils down to lawyers having a reputation as bad employers. This is partially deserved, but there are good ones to be found.)

Very few firms are concerned with education past high school for secretaries; it gives you a leg up if you’ve had some, but not having it doesn’t disqualify you. Since you do have some higher ed and, I’m sure, have great administrative skills and can use software like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook, you probably don’t need more formal education in order to be considered.

There are a couple of industry organizations that offer legal secretarial certifications, NALS and Legal Secretaries International. In some instances, legal experience is a prerequisite to sitting for a certification exam (and it’s always the best idea). Membership and certification fees are rather steep without an employer subsidy, and law firms don’t seem to view the certifications as especially valuable. I don’t believe they give the holders of a PLS or whatever any more or less consideration in hiring. It really comes down to experience and whether you seem to be a fit in terms of personality.

There is specialized knowledge you’ll need, like legal vocabulary and how court systems work. There also might be aspects of Word that you’re not well-versed in that are integral to legal work (complex numbering schemes, tables of authorities, and tables of contents, for starters). These can be learned on the job and in various other free or cheap ways.

Intangible abilities are important, too — probably more so than any one specific specialized skill. Good written and oral communication abilities are vital. You have to be a quick study, able to think on your feet, and self-motivated yet able to adjust to having little if any control over your own priorities. You must be assertive and yet also discreet and subtle.

As someone looking to break into the legal field, you face the same obstacle as a candidate of any age: The best law firm employers require between three and five years of previous legal experience. That can leave you with limited options for landing that first job. There are firms that hire inexperienced legal secretaries, though. Most of them won’t be ideal employers, but they do exist and are where most of us start out.

In your case, I suggest trying for a job with an attorney or firm that specializes in employment law. Your background in HR gives you a solid “platform” in this area. You likely already possess the industry knowledge you would need to relate to clients and understand their needs.

In fact, you might want to try for a job as a paralegal in an employment law practice (especially if you have a bachelor’s degree). This might even be easier with no legal experience than it would be to get a secretarial position. Paralegals — especially those in big firms, which are the best employers — don’t actually do much of what we think of as legal work. They do a lot of document review and organization and manipulation of data — functions your background might just make you uniquely suited for!

I hope my readers will chime in with further suggestions in the comments! (Hint, hint!) Best of luck, and please keep us updated.

The other day, I stumbled across Carol Ann Wilson Story’s article, Proud to Be a Legal Secretary. It’s just about the best encapsulation of what a legal secretary does and why it’s important as I’ve ever seen. She begins:

A voice on the telephone recently asked me, “Are you his secretary, or do you prefer to be called his administrative assistant?” I told him, “I am his secretary and very proud of it.” You could hear the relief in his voice as he replied, “Thank goodness I can deal with a real person the one who really runs things and I don’t have to deal with a prima donna who takes offense at the least little thing!” Now, I’m serious. This really happened. And I think he voiced a common feeling, because people know that a secretary especially a legal secretary is close to the boss, can be trusted with information, and will handle all matters correctly. (But we know who really runs things and it’s not the secretary.)

This is such a good description. No, we secretaries don’t run things. I wouldn’t want to work for a boss who needed me to run his business. What kind of boss would that be? But the lawyer’s right hand is . . . instrumental.

Carol Ann is a charter member of Legal Secretaries International, and it shows.

A recent Daily Report article features profiles of seven legal secretaries nominated by their bosses as paragons in the venerable tradition of Perry Mason’s right hand, Della Street.

I’m going to squelch the many snarky comments that came to mind as I read this article. I won’t bother to point out that sewing patches on the boss’s kid’s Brownie uniform isn’t a legal secretary’s job, nor how silly and potentially dangerous it is for a divorce law secretary to give clients her mobile phone number. I won’t ask whether a secretary who had to change her travel plans to accommodate her boss was reimbursed for what those last-minute rearrangements must have cost her. I won’t ponder why on earth a licensed attorney would choose a career as a secretary and, in between screening phone calls, ghost-write hundreds of briefs. (If all you want to do is write, why not be a law clerk or a staff attorney?)

And mum is definitely the word on my opinion of lawyers who know so little about their own practices that they can’t work on their own for even one day.

I will, instead, focus on how wonderful it is that seven top-notch legal assistants finally got some public credit for all the fine work they do behind the scenes, toiling away in efficient, organized obscurity. I’ll even express my envy for the secretary who is also curator of her firm’s considerable art collection.

May we all have our moments in the spotlight.

Amid the many job-related Web sites out there, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook Handbook often gets overlooked. Yet it’s probably the best all-around resource for credible information on employment and salary statistics — not to mention projections about the growth of a given profession over the next few years.

With that in mind, I suggest a quick look at the Handbook’s page on Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, and then — even more enlightening — the Occupational Employment and Wages page for legal secretaries. The latter page lists top-paying states, metro areas, and industries, among many other juicy tidbits.

The Brazen Careerist has treated her readers to Three tips for job hunting, all taken from Cynthia Shapiro’s latest book, What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here?: 44 Insider Secrets That Will Get You Hired. These tips are not your usual tried-and-true, heard-it-all-before advice. Shapiro, you might recall, is also the author of the most excellent Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know—and What to Do About Them.

According to Law.com, New York firm Bivona & Cohen has filed a pre-emptive declaratory judgment suit against legal secretary Windy Richards (a/k/a Wendy Ogando), who had offered to drop allegations of rape against partner Joseph Figliolo in exchange for $9 million. Bivona’s move is a relatively new strategy — most famously used by Bill O’Reilly — of pre-emptively suing someone who threatens to sue.

At first blush, it might seem like the big bad law firm (or in this case, not so big at only 38 lawyers) is trying to bully the poor, beleaguered victim of sexual harassment and assault. But a complete reading of the Law.com article calls that notion into question. Huge question.

(Be warned, the article is about as graphic as anything you’ll ever see at Law.com.)

I was reminded of my years working in insurance defense and of the sexual harassment complaints I saw then. Roughly 75% them did not comport with most people’s definition of sexual harassment. Sure, there were a few bosses who really were chasing female staff members around desks, wheedling them with promises of promotions, threatening them with termination, and pinching their behinds.

But far more often, these “harassment” claims clearly resulted from consensual workplace affairs and flirtations gone wrong, with the parties sharing blame more or less equally. I always wondered why a woman would file a lawsuit in these situations. Why trot out all those sordid details and immortalize them in the public record? No amount of money would be worth that to me.

(I never saw one of these cases go to trial or even settle, because our client insurers always denied coverage and won. Sexual misconduct just isn’t covered under your garden variety commercial liability policy. Course and scope, anyone?)

That’s what I think this Windy Richards-Joseph Figliolo business is. First, why the $9 million demand but no criminal charges? If she was raped and was clear-headed enough about it to make a monetary demand, why didn’t she go to a hospital, get a rape kit done, and lodge a criminal complaint?

Second, the, um, activities that transpired (the gross part of the article) are hardly likely to have been non-consensual. On Ms. Richards’s part, they probably weren’t even spontaneous. Mr. Figliolo appears to be, at worst, a complete idiot with no impulse control, who was at work drunk. Not exactly boss of the year, but no criminal.

And third are the personal details Bivona says it has unearthed on Ms. Richards: a criminal history and the use of a false Social Security number and an alias to get the job at their firm.

A pattern is emerging. This is why most law firms perform exhaustive background checks on everyone they hire. Bivona & Cohen probably will do so from now on. They might also want to keep a closer eye on their partners’ behavior. This thing isn’t likely to cost them $9 million, but it ain’t gonna be cheap.