This time last year I did some voluntary work for El Shaddai children’s charity in India and I would like to give you an update to how my fundraising has progressed over the past year.  El Shaddai provide orphans, street, slum, abused and sick children with the basic necessities of life.  The care the children receive develops their personalities and helps them to have a brighter future.  El Shaddai’s slogan is ‘Let there be no child on the streets without a proper childhood and they need help to fulfill their dream.'

Since I obtained my Associate Membership of this Institute, I have been working in litigation.  It has equipped me with necessary skills pertaining to the court litigation process after the Philippine Supreme Court’s Approval on the Small Claims Court and the amendments of Civil Procedure in Philippine Courts, as promulgated by Philippine Supreme Court.

The amendments of the 1997 Philippine Civil Procedure gave the chance for the Small Claims Court to be created in 2008.  Now it has been implemented across the lower courts in my country.  It gives a “taste of swift justice” to the underprivileged citizens of our country for them to obtain justice, or if they are the defendants of a particular case, swift vindication can be obtained.

At the Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs, we have used our journal to report back on the effects of employment law on economic recovery in the past. We discussed the possibility that some businesses were struggling to cope with the financial burden that such legal regulations impose upon them, and how this may have led to a sharp increase in the number of employment tribunals that were being pursued.

In today’s high-tech work environment you may find yourself pushed to learn how to use new software in order to take on a new role or responsibility. Sometimes you may find yourself forced into using software that you have never heard of, let alone used. Maybe it’s not even the case that it’s new software; rather, you get forced into using the same old application in a way that surpasses your technical capabilities. If you are like me, you may just want to master a new application for fun as well as for the potential work benefits.

Is that a groan familiar from your school days?  If only you had listened, you’d know all about nouns, verbs, sentences and so on.  Or perhaps you were part of the ‘lost generation’ at school between the late 1960s and 1990s, and so you didn’t have a formal education in grammar and punctuation.  Do not fear: here are our top ten tips on grammar:

We recognise these calls pretty quickly, don't we?  The callers with high-pitched speech, sighs, long pauses, terse answers and increasing volume.  Telling them to "take it easy" or "stay calm" will probably make it worse.  So before your call turns abusive, here are top ten tips to help you handle a difficult caller:

If you have never studied criminal law, you may well be under the impression that provocation could be used as a defence to mitigate a number of different charges. For example, if someone is charged with an assault, surely they may have been provoked into committing that offence? However, with the defence of provocation, this could not be further from the truth. This is because this specific defence is only available for a person who has been charged with murder; it is not possible to rely on this defence in the case of manslaughter.

It is often said that we ought not to worry. In fact, this is far from the case, provided we ‘worry well’. Our brains thrive on being stretched and on finding solutions to difficulties. When we worry well, we engage both our higher intelligence and our innate creativity, which not only reduces stress but also gives us a sense of competence and achievement. So worrying well is good for you and is a skill we can all usefully cultivate.

Worrying well involves engaging, perhaps with a sense of curiosity, with a problem to see if we can do anything about it (and then taking action) or, if we can’t do anything about it, figuring out whether we need to change our reaction to it and then working on changing that reaction. Some people find it useful to use what is called a worry decision tree. Here it is:

I started working as an office junior in November 1999, aged 17 years.  I had actually wanted to be a Travel Agent, but upon gaining one day’s work experience with a local firm I decided this career was not for me, mainly because they put me in a back office to file invoices all day.  I really believe that if you are trying to sell a position to someone, they need to experience it properly in order to make an informed decision.

Three weeks later I found myself still unemployed and getting desperate to stand on my own two feet, which is when I came across an advertisement in the jobs section of the local newspaper for an Office Junior in a City Centre Solicitors firm.  At this point I didn’t have any office experience, but as they were advertising for a junior I thought, “How much experience could they want from me?”

A review of the rules on appointing expert witnesses and an outline of best practices when instructing an expert

This is the sixth article in a series focusing on specialist skills and knowledge in Civil Litigation. Expert witness evidence can be crucial to winning a case, so choosing the right expert and instructing him or her properly is an important task. As a legal secretary, you would not normally be expected to choose the actual expert in a case, but that does not mean you do not have a role in the process.

Like nearly everything else nowadays, there are sometimes too many choices, so being in a position to narrow down the options is valuable to a fee earner as it will save him or her time. If you are asked to compile contact details for appropriate experts, there are a number of places you can look.