Take a look around your workspace. Is it organised or a disaster area? Can you quickly and easily find things? Are there any items that are just taking up space?

In honour of National Clean Off Your Desk Day, it’s a great time to take a critical look at your workspace. Follow these three steps to make it a more productive area!

1. Create workspace zones. There are three zones you need to think about as you clear the clutter and put systems in place for staying organised. The three zones are:

• Zone 1: Prime Workspace. Zone 1 is the main workspace at your desk – the centre of activity that is within arm’s reach of your computer and phone.

Here is a selection of vacancies from our Legal Secretary Jobs Board this month:

Legal Assistant/Secretary – Moore Barlow     

Location: Guildford

Salary: Competitive    

Are you a reliable and highly organised individual looking to work for a newly merged firm carving out a new way of working within the Legal sector? This is a great role for someone ambitious looking to get really involved in a great Commercial Property team where you will be fully supported.

View the full job description here:           

https://www.institutelegalsecretaries.com/jobs/candidate/job/192979/

Legal Secretary – Eversheds Sutherland (Luxemburg) LLP

Location: Luxemburg

“We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our to-do list.”

– Michelle Obama

The PA Show is the largest gathering of Executive Support Professionals in the UK, bringing together thousands of members of the community under one roof.

For over 10 years the community has come together to learn, share and connect at The PA Show, which has CPD-accredited content across the two days applying to Executive Support Professionals at every stage of their career and budget.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it so many changes, many of which occurred almost overnight. One of the largest that has impacted almost all of us has been remote working. For some, this was temporary, but for many of us, this is the new normal, and with offices unlikely to return to 100% capacity in the future, embracing a remote working style is crucial for us all.

In the early part of any career, a lot of time is spent learning the skills, obtaining the knowledge and adopting the behaviours expected. This is certainly the case with Solicitors as they spend years (at least six if not more) reaching the required standard. By studying ILSPA’s Legal Secretaries Diploma course, you will have started the journey to competence in the legal profession.

When you start working within the legal environment, you are taking the next of many further steps in your learning journey. How your employer helps you with your continuing professional development (CPD) will vary, but the standard for any legal employer will be the same – continuing professional competence.

On 18 November 2021, SecsintheCity – the UK’s only dedicated job site for business support professionals – hosted the 10th annual PA of the Year Awards.

These awards celebrate the successes and accomplishments of Personal Assistants, Executive Assistants and Office Managers from the past year. For the second year running, the PA of the Year Awards were held virtually, but that didn’t stop attendees from turning out in the event’s traditional black-tie attire.

Breanna Worton – a Legal PA working at global law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and winner of the Legal PA of the Year Award at this year’s event – took the time to answer some questions about her career, winning this accolade and what it means to her.

For many years now, the team at Heat Recruitment in Bristol have been collating retrospective analytical data from their in-house software systems. This allows them to create a comparative salary data set across all the sectors that they work in, including legal. This year, they have decided to formalise this data and make it more widely available in the form of their 2022 Salary Survey.

To give enhanced context and insight to their Salary Survey, they asked their Associate Directors to give their key take-aways and perspectives from the year in business, and to reflect on the hiring trends that they foresee continuing to impact the market in the year ahead. Dan Hazzard, Associate Director of Legal, had the following key take-outs for the legal sector.

In many industries, the line between managers and workers tends to be fairly clear. Managers manage; workers work. An employee in a retail setting, for instance, generally isn’t responsible for handling their manager’s schedule, making calls and sending emails on the manager’s behalf, or preparing the manager for important meetings.

At the corporate level, however, things are a bit different. An admin supporting a high-level executive is expected to do all those things and more. Your entire job revolves around making your executive’s job easier. And one of the best ways to do that is to learn how to “manage up”.

On 18 November 2021, SecsintheCity, the UK’s only dedicated job site for business support professionals, celebrated the tenth annual PA of the Year Awards, partnering with Tay Associates.

These awards are an important event for the recognition of the excellent work that PAs, EAs, and office managers carry out every year. Given the uncertain nature of the last year, it’s especially important to speak about the redoubtable nature of these professionals and the crucial role they play in every business.

Though the awards typically take place at The Ivy in London, this year – as was the case in 2020 – they were held virtually. Even so, attendees still turned out in their black-tie outfits on Zoom.

This might strike you as a relatively mundane topic, but in legal practice, file opening is something that everyone in a law firm should be familiar with. That is not to say that everyone in the firm will be entrusted with this important task, and it is often well-trained admin and support staff like Legal Secretaries who are required to do this work.

The first clue you might have about the importance of file opening procedure is the fact that it is known by so many different names – customer due diligence, onboarding, verification of identity, verification of funds, anti-money laundering (AML). These are all terms that are commonly used in relation to the humble task of opening a file.