A lawyer’s day-to-day tasks outside of casework, from billing and invoicing to managing payments, are often time-consuming. As a result, many law firms seek out legal assistants to keep everything running smoothly and boost their productivity.
Most successful law firms employ support teams with a mix of paralegals and legal assistants, however, the duties of a legal assistant can vary a great deal. In this article, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about legal assistants, including:
What is a legal assistant
Legal assistant responsibilities
How assistants compare to paralegals
What to look for and ethical considerations when hiring a legal assistant
How to write an effective job description for a lawyer’s assistant
How technology is making legal assistants more effective
Regardless of your specific needs, a legal assistant bolstered by the right technology is vital to making your law firm more efficient, so you can increase your caseload, generate more revenue, and better serve your clients.
What Is a Legal Assistant?
Put simply, a legal assistant is a supportive role that performs various tasks, most often administrative work, on a lawyer’s behalf. These can include drafting documents, scheduling meetings and maintaining calendars, doing legal research, and more.
Crucially, a legal assistant is not licensed to practice law. They cannot provide legal advice to clients. However, a lawyer’s assistant is still crucial for helping lawyers prepare for cases and providing a superior client experience.
What Is the Difference Between a Legal Secretary, Legal Assistant, and Paralegal?
The terms legal assistant, legal secretary, and paralegal are often used interchangeably. Indeed, the updated definition by the American Bar Association (ABA) includes legal assistant and paralegal together:
“A legal assistant or paralegal is a person, qualified by education, training or work experience who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation, governmental agency or other entity and who performs specifically delegated substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible.”
In practice, legal assistants, legal secretaries, and paralegals are not always considered the same. Even if the definitions aren’t universal, it can be valuable to define a legal assistant’s responsibilities internally in order to better advertise and fill support roles.
Legal Secretary—Mostly Administrative Work
A legal secretary is someone whose primary focus is handling non-legal, administrative tasks for a law firm, so lawyers have more time to spend on billable hours. Because they aren’t required to have any education or background in law, they don’t assist a lawyer with specific legal tasks.
These tasks can include:
Scheduling meetings
Billing and accounting
Organizing paperwork
Answering phone calls and emails
Directing communications
Paralegal—Mostly Legal Work
Unlike a legal secretary, paralegals are typically hired to help with legal tasks instead of the administrative side of the business. These professionals often use paralegal-specific tools to help lawyers with more complicated, billable tasks but at a significantly lower cost to the firm than hiring another lawyer. While a paralegal can’t give legal advice to clients or take cases, they can help lawyers with things such as:
Doing legal or factual research
Drafting legal documents
Interviewing clients or witnesses
Preparing for trial
Legal Assistant—A Mix of Both
Unlike the more clearly defined roles of a paralegal and legal secretary, a legal assistant’s duties often fall somewhere in between the two. One key difference between a legal assistant and a secretary, however, is that legal assistants are usually expected to have a higher education level or more legal experience than a legal secretary.
On an average employment website, you’ll often find that job descriptions for a legal assistant are not as consistent, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many successful law firms find them valuable exactly because of that flexibility.
A legal assistant will often help with administrative tasks while also doing basic legal research, proofreading, and more. However, because their role is more nebulous, it’s important to understand and clearly communicate your law firm’s unique needs to find the right support.
What Level of Education/Certifications Is Required To Be a Legal Assistant?
Just as the legal assistant tasks and descriptions can vary, so do the various educational and training requirements.
Here’s a rough breakdown of what to look for when hiring an attorney’s assistant.
Educational/Training Requirements
Most law firms will only consider a legal assistant candidate who has, at a minimum, a bachelor’s degree. However, if you are looking for a legal secretary to primarily handle administrative tasks, an associate’s degree may be sufficient.
Instead of looking for a specific degree, you might consider offering on-the-job training. It may be easier for someone who’s already tech-savvy to learn your case management system and then slowly train them on the legal details that will let them grow into a more comprehensive support role over time.
Additionally, especially at the legal assistant level, the value of on-the-job experience may trump that of a specific degree. In other words, with enough training, the right legal secretary could grow into an invaluable legal assistant or paralegal who also has a firm understanding of the business side of the firm.
Certification Options
Outside of their degree, many people choose to gain skills specific to the job through a paralegal or legal assistant certificate program.
The ABA offers a directory of approved paralegal education programs that aspiring attorney’s assistants can do online or in person. While not required to become a legal assistant or paralegal, these programs familiarize people with a legal assistant’s tasks and help prepare them for the unique complexities of the legal industry.
What Is the Typical Pay Rate for a Legal Assistant?
As you might expect, with so many different duties and levels of expertise, the salary requirements of a legal assistant can vary wildly.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual wage of a more experienced legal assistant is around $29 an hour or just over $60,000 annually. However, some job sites like Indeed list a lower hourly range (around $22 an hour).
However, this can vary based on:
Location
Level of expertise
The duties they’re asked to perform
Generally speaking, expect to pay a salary of $20 an hour (W-2) to a legal assistant performing mostly administrative tasks and $28 - $35 an hour (or more) for a legal assistant more heavily involved in legal tasks.
Long story short, if a legal assistant’s role is closer to a paralegal than a legal secretary, they typically earn more.
What Are a Legal Assistant’s Duties?
While we’ve gone over the basic definition of a legal assistant and how it differs from a paralegal, that still leaves the burning question, “What does a legal assistant do?” To give you a better idea of the specifics, here are a few of the common day-to-day duties of a legal assistant:
Scheduling and Calendar Management
Legal assistants ensure lawyers meet deadlines and smooth out the intake process by scheduling meetings, interviews, and other key appointments. Combined with calendaring software, legal assistants also get a unified view of the firm’s entire caseload, which can be invaluable for business planning and goal setting.
Client Communication and Customer Service
Lawyers can get bogged down with substantive work, which makes it easy to neglect customer service and client communication. A legal assistant can ensure that prospects and clients get prompt replies by answering phone calls, replying to emails, or even chatting through a client portal. They can also add a layer of organization and responsiveness by ensuring all communications and documents are up to date.
Accounting and Billing
Having a smooth payments and billing process is key to maintaining positive cash flow and growth. Since many lawyers use software for time tracking, legal assistants can easily prepare accurate invoices faster than ever.
They can also help with online payments by checking for invoicing errors, walking clients through the billing and payments process, and promptly resolving any payment issues that arise. Having someone to manage accounts and spot potential errors helps maintain trust accounting compliance.
Basic Legal Research and Writing
Legal assistants with the right education or experience may be asked to assist with researching and analyzing case law, statutes, or other legal information on a lawyer’s behalf. Many lawyers are trying to expedite research with legal AI, and legal assistants can assure firms are reaping the time-saving benefits of the technology without the risk by fact-checking summaries, compiling relevant citations, and more.
In addition, they can assist with drafting legal briefs, contracts, letters, and other legal documents.
Administrative and Document Support
Legal assistants often ensure that important documents are properly organized and client records are maintained within the firm’s case management systems. They might type supporting notes for cases, link to relevant case law, and do other organizational tasks.
Additionally, they’ll help with other tasks like gathering evidence or documents, arranging the filing of court documents, making travel arrangements, or even greeting clients and walking them through the intake process.
Should Your Firm Hire a Legal Assistant?
While almost every firm needs some help in areas that overlap with a legal assistant’s duties, not every firm needs a full-time legal assistant. Before starting the hiring process for a legal assistant, you should first ask yourself a few key questions:
What kind of tasks do we need help with? Communication? Research?
Do we need assistance on a daily basis, or could someone address our needs on a part-time schedule? Would a freelance or virtual assistant work best for us?
Do we need a legal assistant or a paralegal?
How much of the assistant’s work could be helped or fully handled by legal technology?
At the end of the day, hiring a legal assistant is a big business decision, so don’t rush it. Take the time to understand your firm’s strengths and weaknesses, options for assistance, and financial situation.
Traits of a Good Legal Assistant
What makes a good legal assistant? It’s a difficult question to answer because it really depends on your law firm’s goals and unique needs. Regardless, there are a few traits that many effective legal assistants share:
Strong communication skills: Since a legal assistant will likely handle client communication, their ability to converse well both over the phone and in writing is essential for maintaining your firm’s reputation.
Technology and computer skills: As more law firms use case management software or billing software to help with their day-to-day, it’s vital that your legal assistants work effectively within those systems.
Organization skills: One of the most valuable things a legal assistant can help with is maintaining client files and other important documents. If their organizational style doesn’t make sense to you or fit within your existing systems, then you’ll struggle to create an efficient document library and find files when you need them.
Familiarity with legal practice: Prior knowledge of law or your practice area isn’t essential for every type of legal assistant. However, if you require them to proofread and draft legal documents, at least a basic understanding of legal process and research is a must. Additionally, having some familiarity with the day-to-day of a legal practice can go a long way toward making sure they settle in quickly.
Ethical Rules to Consider
A legal assistant can help a law firm run more efficiently and potentially perform substantive legal work—but they are not lawyers. Because of this distinction, there are a few ethical considerations you need to keep in mind when working with a legal assistant.
Maintaining confidentiality: A legal assistant won’t directly be handling a client’s legal matters, but they will likely have access to sensitive information. It’s vital that legal assistants understand the importance of safeguarding client information and following cybersecurity best practices.
Performing appropriate duties: A paralegal or legal assistant’s duties might include helping a lawyer, but they cannot do a lawyer’s work. While a legal assistant is likely to communicate and coordinate with clients, they must not give legal advice or make decisions on a case.
Avoiding conflicts of interest: When hiring a legal assistant, it’s important to avoid conflicts of interest (such as hiring a paralegal directly from another law firm working on the same matter).
When you define the duties of a legal assistant at your firm, ensure a clear separation of tasks to avoid ethical landmines.
Writing a Job Description for a Legal Assistant
Since the definition of a legal assistant varies so wildly, it’s important to write a detailed and thorough job description to ensure both you and the candidate are on the same page. In other words, don’t assume that a candidate knows what you mean when you say “legal assistant.”
A legal assistant job description should consist of:
Job title
Short 1-paragraph job description
Firm background (number of people, practice area, work culture, etc.)
Education, skills, and experience requirements (along with which are hard requirements and which are nice-to-haves)
Administrative job duties (client communication, calendar management, etc.)
Legal work responsibilities (legal research, document drafting, etc.)
How Software Assists Legal Assistants
Modern case and client management software is revolutionizing how law firms run, including the ability to automate many labor-intensive tasks. This has led some to believe that software can replace the role of a legal assistant entirely.
In truth, legal software is most effective when it supplements the work of a dedicated support team, which can ultimately lead to higher caseloads and more billable hours for the firm. Features supporting case management also ensure legal assistants have greater visibility over every case, allowing them to focus their time on the areas that are most crucial to the firm.
Regardless of how you use technology, there will always be areas like communication and lead management where a human touch is not only preferred but absolutely necessary to maintain high client satisfaction.
Equip Your Legal Assistants With Leading Legal Technology Solution MyCase
In the past, only the biggest firms could afford to have a dedicated support team to handle non-billable (but vital) day-to-day operations like accounting, scheduling, lead management, and more. Further, hiring additional paralegals was often the only way to get help with important legal tasks without disrupting a firm’s daily operations.
The flexibility of legal assistants combined with advances in technology have changed all of that for the better. Whether it’s for a single attorney or a growing firm, dedicated legal case management software like MyCase gives legal assistants the specialized tools they need to be more effective.
With capabilities supporting better case management, client communication, and billing and payments, MyCase helps firms of all sizes do more with less. It also allows legal assistants to focus on the areas that are most important to your business.
Schedule a MyCase demo today to learn more.
About the author
MyCase Team