Keep legal offices running smoothly.

Legal Secretaries provide support to solicitors, barristers and law clerks. The role involves producing a high volume of correspondence and legal documents along with a wide range of administrative tasks.

In addition to typing, legal secretaries handle phone calls, schedule appointments, and may offer non-legal advice to clients. They carry out a lot of admin tasks such as invoicing, updating database, manage phone and emails, archiving documents, liaising with clients and internal stakeholders.

General office and administration experience is an advantage. Secretarial and office-related courses are available at TAFE SA. For further information, please check out the TAFE SA Website.

TAFE SA offers Certificate IV in Legal Services relevant to this occupation.

Good legal secretary can expect to work for a senior partner, or a barrister. Barristers usually require their secretaries to have more than just good typing skills. They generally want someone who can maintain their accounts and computer systems as well as prepare legal documents at a moment's notice. Skilled secretaries also often advance to becoming law clerks or 'para legals'. Depending on the area of practice involved, a secretary may be asked to perform basic legal research and preparation of documents under the supervision of a qualified legal professional - as not all areas of law can support a clerk. With experience, the secretary can be officially appointed as a clerk and a new secretary assigned to their previous position.

Legal secretary's job is made easier today by the use of macros or templates. These are often provided (on disk) by government authorities such as the Australian Securities and Investment Commission or the Department of Land Administration, or they may be constructed in-house by the firm's computing staff. Either way, they make for easy production of documents, without the secretary needing to know how to create complicated forms from scratch. The downside to all this technology, however, is that legal secretaries now need to know more than ever before. The variety of software now available means that new secretaries and relief staff have to be trained in that firm's set-up before they can commence work. Which may mean that they may need at least two hours' training before they can type a letter!

Match that with a knowledge of legal terminology and procedures in a given area of law and you can see why good legal secretaries are becoming increasingly hard to find. Although most legal secretaries don't initially choose a particular area of law, once experienced, they tend to stay with that field (whatever it may happen to be). They may end up working in criminal law with the Crown Solicitor's Office, family law with Legal Aid, or commercial law or litigation with a large, or small partnership. Working in a well-appointed city high-rise or cramped suburban offices, they generally work for three or four members of the professional staff. In a large firm especially, they may work for a partner, one or two solicitors, and an articled clerk. Secretaries working in small offices may work for two partners or, if working for a barrister (a legal specialist), they may work for a sole practitioner.