Becoming a tutor with the Institute of Legal Secretaries

I started teaching shortly after I finished law school. I found the experience terrifying but exciting. Fortunately, the butterflies went away quickly but the excitement of exchanging ideas with others never did. I was aware of a hands-on training course for legal secretaries when I was teaching the National Association of Paralegals course in the late 1990s. I found that with both courses the practical approach to legal study was very refreshing. In 2005 there was an opportunity to provide training for the Institute that I was very happy to take up.

My background and legal experience

Attitude is a mind-set. It is the way you look at things mentally. When things are going well a positive attitude is easy to maintain. But we're all human and something will always happen to test our positive mind-set. So when that happens, here are the top 10 tips to help you bounce back and regain a positive outlook:

1.    Nurture your funny focus. While it's not appropriate to laugh away all serious problems, laughing can help you transfer your focus from the problem to possible solutions.

Is it career suicide to ask for a pay rise in the current economic climate?

Imagine the scene – you’ve worked with the same company for a good few years and over the last two years you’ve had nothing by way of a pay increase, not even the cost of living. With margins being squeezed from all sides how do you ask for a pay rise? When it comes to asking for a pay rise, even the most confident people can suffer a crisis of confidence.

The tour we conduct takes Students around an area of London known as ‘The Temple’, where many barristers’ chambers are located, and the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, which contains 86 courts and 3.5 miles of corridors and houses the High Court in London and the Appeal Courts, both Civil and Criminal.

We visit part of the ‘Inner Temple’ and pass by the famous ‘Temple Church’ - yes, the very same Temple Church depicted in the Da Vinci Code!

It’s like entering a different world because, as we step through an archway from the very busy Strand into a side passage, the traffic noise suddenly disappears into deafening silence! We stop to look around us at all the beautiful buildings housing the chambers and discuss how barristers’ chambers operate.

The nine Legal Secretaries pictured below were the first to pass the Legal Secretaries Diploma course run by advocates of the GTA University Centre in association with The Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs. The GTA worked closely with members of the local industry to deliver the course, which started in September 2007 and was tutored by Gavin Ferguson, Allan Skirrow and Philip Nicol-Gent, also pictured. Gavin is an advocate of Ozannes Advocates and Notaries Public Guernsey and practices as a trust lawyer, advising a wide range of professional trustees on all issues concerning trusts. Allan is an advocate of the Royal Court of Guernsey and currently appointed by Carey Olsen as part of their corporate group. Allan has acted on behalf of various developers and advised on many aspects of property acquisition.

In the last two issues we have looked at preparing and writing a report. The third and final stage of report writing is to check your report. Make sure you are methodical when checking, no matter how much you feel you know what you have written: start at the top of page one, and keep going until the last line of the last page!

When you have finished writing your report, run spellcheck on it, then take a printout and leave it for as long as possible (preferably a day or two) so you can read it with fresh eyes. It may be worth asking somebody else to read it as well, as they will spot mistakes not noticeable to you. See the ten points below, which are divided into three stages, for checking longer reports. For shorter reports, check everything but you will be able to check all the points at once.

Civil Litigation Procedure - Part 2

In our last article on Civil Litigation, we outlined some of the history of the current litigation rules and what should be considered before a legal claim is issued. In this article, we will consider some of the steps that a Defendant can take when responding to a claim.

Avoidance is the best policy

We are unlikely ever to have sufficient time to do all the things we want or need to do. Therefore, it’s vital to make the best use of the time we have available. And since time itself is not physically manageable, we have to learn to manage ourselves, our workloads, our priorities and our clutter. Here are top ten tips to help you do this:

1. Never let others solve their time problems by creating yours! Make sure you know how and when to say ‘no’, and are in agreement about the next move. It is far better to negotiate tasks and deadlines as they arise than to accept everything and then lose face because you can't cope.

In the last issue we looked at preparing to write a report. If you have been following all the tips in that issue, you are now ready to write your report! To write well, use plain English and adopt the ABC's of writing: be accurate, be brief and be clear. There is no point investing time and effort in your report only to have your readers lay it aside or ignore it because they find it full of jargon, difficult to read or badly laid out. So here are top ten tips for writing a report:

1. Be accurate by checking the spelling, grammar and punctuation. Also check all your facts and figures. For example, check that columns add up, or that your survey results haven’t been superseded by the time you come to compile your report.

Civil Litigation Procedure - Part 1

The Rules of Civil Litigation

The law is fundamentally about knowing what the rules are. Every area of law will have particular rules that must be followed. In litigation it is important to be familiar with the correct rules because if you are not, then inevitably your opponent (or the court itself) will be all too happy to point out the error of your ways! Worse still, if you make a major mistake, you may be liable to pay your opponent’s legal costs or even lose a case entirely.