Part 1 – Preparation

One of the key aspects of being able to take minutes at meetings is the importance of preparing to take minutes. The better prepared you are the easier it will be for you to concentrate on taking minutes during the meeting. So here are the top 10 tips to help you prepare so that you can focus on the meeting rather than worry about what it’s about, whether you’ve booked coffee or if the PowerPoint works.

Problem? What problem? Problems are not really problems – they’re improvement opportunities...although I will admit that they don’t always feel that way at the time. But the reality is, problems can exist, and if we use effective problem-solving skills, tools and techniques, we can significantly improve the situation. So here are the top 10 tips for improving your problem solving:

There is an exercise you can do which is an incredibly powerful tool to dispose of lingering angry feelings towards someone’s behaviour or to release words when we have not been able fully to articulate our anger at the time. It might apply to a difficult client, a colleague, a manager or someone closer to home. The exercise is based on an approach originally published by a Dr Mahfouz in 2008.

It has been announced recently that the coalition Government is seriously considering new employment laws that would effectively make it more difficult for an employee to bring a claim of unfair dismissal against his or her employer. If you have been following our journal over recent months, you may recall how we touched on the massive increase in employment tribunals being brought by disgruntled employees against their employers – in fact, the latest statistics show that 218,000 tribunals were heard last year, and there has been a 40% increase in tribunals over the last three years.

Have you ever felt as though you spend a good portion of your working day doing trivial things on your Windows desktop – highlighting sentences, minimising and maximising windows and applications, endlessly right-clicking on things and scrolling through context menus? If so then this list is for you. Now you can wow your colleagues with your IT savvy, using this list of tricks every Windows user should know:

If you have been thinking about pursuing a career as a Paralegal or you would like to increase your skill set and maximise your employability as a Legal Secretary, look no further than AH Paralegal Training. The AH Paralegal Practical Skills course is short and intensive, taking place over three to four days in London, Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol.

Benefits of Attending the Course

Once a month, Students have the opportunity to attend a tour of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, commonly known as the ‘Law Courts’. The building houses the Court of Appeal and the High Court. As you may have learnt from the English Legal System unit of the Legal Secretaries Diploma course, the Court of Appeal has two divisions – the Civil division, which hears appeals from the High Court, and the Criminal division, which hears appeals from the Crown Court. The High Court has three divisions – the Queen’s Bench division, the Chancery division and the Family division – and accommodates the Administrative Court. The building, breathtaking with its Gothic style and lavish interior, was opened by Queen Victoria in 1882.

Prioritise tasks using the Windows 7 taskbar

When you look at the Windows taskbar, you probably would never think that it can be used as an effective to- do list. Windows 7 allows you to drag application icons on the taskbar to the left and right, however, and you can use this to prioritise your tasks at hand. Arrange your open applications from left to right according to priority. For example, if answering email is your most important task, keep Outlook to the left, followed by that Word document you need to work on before lunch, then your case management system and finally the game of solitaire that you hope to win once you have completed your pressing tasks.

If you are a regular reader of articles from the Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs on legal issues, you may notice that this subject was covered some time ago and it is an issue that insists on making the news. Politicians all seem to make noise about changing the law concerning the use of reasonable force to protect yourself, your loved ones and your property, but it is a fact that we are no further forward today than we were when the Tony Martin murder case hit the headlines back in 1999.

At times we can be our own worst enemy. Whilst this can take any number of forms, one particular culprit is self-criticism. You know the sort of thing: you find yourself saying or thinking things like ‘I’m useless’, ‘What an idiot!’ ‘I’m no good at this’ or ‘I can’t do it.’ Although an appropriate dose of constructive self-criticism can motivate us, a higher dose puts us under stress and generally makes things worse as a result. We invariably come out with global self-critical remarks or thoughts like the ones above when we are under stress already. Piling on yet more stress prevents us from accessing our innate capacity to help and support ourselves in a positive and encouraging way.