2023

Following a long consultation that started in 2019, several changes to the Civil Procedural Rules (CPR) came into force on 1 October 2023. 

One of the most significant changes was the reform of the rules on how cases are managed by the Court. Since the introduction of the CPR in 2001, cases have been allocated into 3 tracks:

•    The small claims track - for cases with a value of not more than £10,000;
•    The fast track - for claims between £10,000 to £25,000; and
•    The multi-track - for cases over £25,000.

There will now be a new track called the ‘intermediate track’ for claims of more than £25,000, but less than £100,000. 

Inheritance tax is a proportional payment of a person's assets paid back to the government once they have passed away. It’s a complicated topic, as there are exemptions and varying rates according to personal circumstances. For law students and legal secretaries, there’s a number of factors that you must take into account when advising an individual on their inheritance tax requirements.

Many people want to try and reduce their tax liability as much as possible. Providing accurate advice during a client’s will-writing process and advice to relatives after a death can help with this. To help you begin to grasp the ins and outs, we’ve created a short guide to how inheritance tax (IHT) works.

This month, ILSPA had the pleasure of speaking to former Student, Ellie Braddick. Ellie studied with ILSPA a couple of years ago and it was wonderful to speak to her about how her career has progressed since completing her Legal Secretaries Diploma. Now a Legal PA in Central London, Ellie balances her busy job supporting 6 fee-earners with studying for a Law Degree.

Find out how Ellie juggles work and studying, why she thinks ILSPA gave her a behind-the-scenes insight into her role and what her plans are for when she graduates. 

Can you tell us a bit about your background and your current role?

Previously, we wrote an article for our Students about applying the hierarchy of needs to their studies. In this article, we would like to explain how those needs can be applied to your work too.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this theory before, the hierarchy of needs was developed by Abraham Maslow who was famous for his work in positive psychology. He believed that our needs form a pyramid, where basic physiological factors must be met first so we can then satisfy other needs such as safety, belonging and self-esteem. When we have our needs met at each level, we have the confidence and motivation to progress to the next. The highest level is self-actualisation.

When you work as a Legal Secretary or PA, it can feel like a rather female oriented profession. This is not necessarily the case though. It was great to speak with Dan Self, a successful Legal PA working in employment law who feels that being a man is a real bonus in this role.

Can you tell us about your background and how you came to be a Legal PA?

I was working in hospitality and was undecided on what I wanted to do in life. I attended a local college day and chatted with the tutor about the likelihood of being successful as a Legal Secretary as a man. They assured me that being a male Legal Secretary would only be a bonus. I then joined the college on a full-time basis for two years in my late twenties. The rest, as they say, is history.

If you have been a Legal Secretary for some time, you may be wondering where to take your career next. Setting up your own Paralegal practice may be a venture worth considering, especially if it turns out you’ve been fulfilling the role of a Paralegal already without realising.

Your job title may not be Paralegal, but if your work involves any sort of legality, you are likely a paralegal. For example, are you involved in drafting or reviewing commercial contracts or employment contracts? Do you do legal research to assist someone in your department? Are you involved in compliance or regulation ensuring that statutory criteria are met and adhered to? Are you involved in reviewing documents in relation to childcare proceedings? This list of examples is not exhaustive.

Work stress can contribute to mental health problems for people working in any industry, but some job roles can be more stressful than others. Jobs in the legal sector can involve long hours during busy periods, and sometimes the work environment can put you under high pressure when dealing with strict deadlines.

Here are three reasons why it's so important to take care of your mental health as a Legal Secretary or PA.

1. Stress can lead to additional mental health problems 

The role of Legal PAs is varied and requires them to have a wide and diverse skill set. One skill that is essential and very in demand is that of diary management. Diary management is sometimes overlooked as a specific skill, but nothing could be further from the truth.

SecsintheCity found in their most recent salary survey that diary management was listed as one of the most in-demand skills for professionals across the board, being stated by 21% of their audience. In collaboration with ILSPA, they have created this guide for Legal PAs to help them become experts in the field.    

Calendar organisation:

Microsoft Office is an essential program in a Legal Secretary's repertoire. Whether it’s formulating documents in Word, tracking hours in Excel or fine-tuning an office presentation in PowerPoint, you would be hard-pressed to find a Legal Secretary or PA who does not use a Microsoft Office program daily. Microsoft Office skills are highly sought after and often mandatory with recruiters when they are looking to fill their next Legal Secretary vacancy. For these reasons, it is clear that Microsoft Office certifications are both sensible investments and hugely beneficial additions to your skill-set.

One of the best things about having a Legal Secretary or PA career is that it is a varied and exciting role. It requires a range of skills and attributes and because of this, the role suits a variety of different people. Knowledge of law and legal procedures, being computer literate and an understanding of law firm procedures are all excellent skills to have, but what are the foundations of a good Legal Secretary? What natural attributes and skills can someone bring to the role that haven’t been gained through work experience?

Discretion

People expect to find Legal Secretaries, PAs and Assistants in Law Firms but there are so many other businesses that also need legal teams. Speaking to Megan about her role at Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company was incredibly interesting; it was fantastic to hear about her career progression and how she has applied her legal skills in such a well-known company. 

How did you first enter the legal profession?

Those of you who have studied law or who are currently working in the legal profession may already be familiar with the Civil Procedures Rules (CPR). For those who are not, the CPR came into effect in 1999 to ensure that justice is obtained when people go to court. They were created to make civil proceedings cheaper, quicker and fairer, as well as providing a system that was easier to understand. The rules are used by the County Courts, Court of Appeal and High Court of Justice during civil cases in England and Wales. Each year the rules are amended in line with changes in law, procedure, and societal shifts. Some years see big updates whilst others are only minor. In the past, many old-fashioned legal terms and procedures were removed.

Whatever your reason for leaving your current Legal Secretary role, whether it be moving firms, progression, looking to retire or relocate, writing a formal letter of resignation is essential.

Our partner, TotallyLegal, wants to help you leave your current role on a professional and positive note. This article will provide guidance on how to resign from your job smoothly. 

The Professional Etiquette

The opportunities available to Legal Secretaries are ever-increasing. We spoke to Melinda Toth who secured a Solicitor Apprenticeship with her firm while working as a Legal Secretary in their Pensions, Incentives and Corporate Tax team.

Regular readers of ILSPA’s Legal Secretary Journal may remember Melinda from a previous article where she talked about her first role as a Legal Secretary after completing the Legal Secretaries Diploma Course with us in 2018. It is wonderful to hear how her career has progressed and see how far she has come since we were last in touch.   

Can you remind us about how you originally entered the legal profession?

The only realistic answer to this is, “Maybe, maybe not!”

Those of you who have studied Land Law through ILSPA will be familiar with legal estates in land – freehold, leasehold and commonhold. Recently, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for ‘Levelling Up, Housing and Communities’, categorically stated that: “The outdated feudal leasehold system in England and Wales, must be abolished – it needs to go and needs to be replaced by a better system”. The better system, for all intents and purposes being commonhold.

Legal Personal Assistants are a unique group of professionals, who not only possess great knowledge and skills but are often recognised as going above and beyond to support their bosses and teams. Legal PAs are often recognised for their knowledge and specialist skills within the law firm. But more than this, they are often also seen as the problem solver, the support and the fixer. Amid all of this demanding work, it’s easy to forget about oneself and eventually burn out.

That’s why setting boundaries is not just a nice-to-have, but an absolute must. It’s the key to preserving your well-being, maintaining a healthy work-life balance, and ultimately thriving in your career.

A legal career had always been on the cards for Sinead Owen, but when life took her on a different path during the second year of working towards her Law degree, it became clear that it might not be as set in stone. A few years down the line, the pandemic and a furlough gave Sinead the opportunity to look at how to re-enter the legal profession. Sinead used a difficult and insecure time to take the leap back into her dream legal role, and she has continued to take steps to progress ever since.

Can you tell us how you originally entered the legal profession?

If a child decides they want to pursue a career in the law, a frequent reaction is Wow! Or Wow! adjacent. And much of that Wow! is based on a well-worn trope – working in the legal profession is something for the “elite”. It is true that there has been a lot of snobbery around the practice of law – both real and perceived – and it is well documented that the traditional legal professions lacked diversity and did not reflect those they were representing.

Being able to manage your workload well makes all the difference in how you perform in your role. Whether you are a new Legal Secretary or someone who has been working in the legal profession for many years, you will need to manage your workload efficiently. Learning this valuable skill enables you to do your job well and avoid becoming overwhelmed.

To be able to manage your workload successfully, it helps to plan and schedule your tasks. There are some very useful apps that can assist you with this. We have listed some of the best ones here:

Microsoft To-do

Whether you are newly qualified and looking for your first role in the sector, or an experienced Legal Secretary on the hunt for your next position, creating a bespoke CV that matches the job advert, is the best route for advancing to the interview stage. In a competitive job market, it’s more important than ever to curate a stand-out CV to catch the recruiters’ eye. So, you may ask yourself, where’s the value in keeping this essential document updated?

With over 20 years of experience in the legal sector, Elizabeth Forbes has had a very successful and interesting career. From starting out as a Legal Secretary Temp in a local firm at age 19, she progressed all the way to become a Secretarial Co-ordinator for a large Southeast based firm. Her goal had always been to become a Paralegal. So, when a vacancy for a Trainee Paralegal became available in her department 18 months ago, she knew it would be perfect for her.

We caught up with Elizabeth to hear all about her current role as a Trainee Paralegal and the steps she took to get there. She explained why she chose to do further qualifications with ILSPA to help reach her goal and gave some excellent advice for Legal Secretaries at the start of their career.

We don’t often come across court decisions concerning trespass, but it is an interesting area of law to delve into. In a way, it is similar to the tort of nuisance but more divided. For example, trespass encompasses trespass to the person (assault and battery), false imprisonment (including wrongful arrest) and trespass to goods and conversion. Trespass and nuisance are often seen banded together, which is much more common, but not so common as the tort of negligence, which is the ‘leader of the pack’, so to speak. Historically, trespass is possibly one of oldest of the torts. Why? Because this tort basically applies to land and, historically, land was the most important of things.

Whether you are studying, working, or both, a well-focused mind is an essential tool. So, how can you ensure that your brain is working as efficiently as possible? 

Practice mindfulness

"Mindfulness is about focusing attention on the present moment, and practising mindfulness has been shown to rewire the brain so that attention is stronger in everyday life," says Dr Kim Willment, a neuropsychologist from Boston. She recommends taking a moment each day, even if for just a couple of minutes, to sit quietly and refocus your mind. By paying attention to what you are doing and the sensations around you, this small habit helps you to centre yourself and regain clarity.

Train your brain

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the amount of people working from home has increased from 4.7% to 38%. For many, remote working offers a better work-life balance and greater comfort than working in the office. The trouble is, it can be difficult to access training and development opportunities when working outside of a traditional office environment. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to upskill yourself as a remote legal secretary or PA. Here are three ways to grow your skill set and develop your career.

1. Learn how to use the latest digital communication tools

One of the many advantages of being a Legal Secretary is that it’s not a dead-end job. Not only can you receive a higher salary when you gain experience, but you can also work your way up the legal ladder. Paralegals, Legal Executives and Solicitors have all been known to start their careers as Legal Secretaries. By being able to gain valuable experience on the job and having the option of taking some additional training, Legal Secretaries have incredible career prospects.

ILSPA believes that our Students have the potential to achieve ambitious career goals with enough confidence and determination. This belief has been supported through the many high-achieving Students who have graduated with us.

Working from home is fast becoming a common feature of the working week for many of us, and in the legal sector, hybrid and remote working bring many benefits for both individuals and law firms.

For a Legal Secretary, increased productivity, enhanced focus and a better work-life balance are just a few of the ways in which home working can help you manage your workload better. However, it can sometimes be difficult to separate work duties from home responsibilities, and you may need to create some structure to help yourself avoid blurring the lines between work mode and relaxation.

Here are some of the best ways to manage your time when working from home.

Create a schedule

If you’re an introvert, you’re not going to enjoy large crowds on a regular basis. If you’re an extrovert, turning down every invitation to socialise is going to leave you feeling frustrated and bored.

What if I told you that your preferences for managing time and space are just as ingrained in your personality as whether or not you’re up for going to a dinner party?

The Time & Space Style Inventory (TSSI™) was developed by Cena Block, founder of Sane Spaces. Previously, we delved into how to work with (rather than against) your time style preference. Now, we’re going to talk about how your particular personality type manages space.

If you have been a legal secretary for some time, and you are wondering where to take your career next, setting up your own paralegal practice may be a journey worth making. As with most journeys, planning helps things go smoothly, and before you start delivering paralegal services direct to businesses and consumers, there are several issues to consider. These include (vitally) whether you have sufficient qualifications and/or experience, the demand for your new business, and awareness of the dos and don’ts.

Competency

Are you a new Student? Or, in the middle of studying a course but finding it difficult to stay motivated? Perhaps you are returning to studying after a long break and are not sure where to begin? Whatever stage you are at in your course, it is never too late to start building good study habits. Improving your habits will make your study time efficient, productive and far less stressful.

Here are ILSPA’s top tips for creating good study habits:

Establish your learning type

Those of you who are studying criminal law or working in a criminal law department may not have come across the concept of ‘Autrefois Acquit’ before. In fact, it is very rare, but I mention it here because it has reared its head in the past year. I also mention it because when I was a law student, in the long distant past, legal maxims in a language other than English (mainly in Latin or French) were certainly not uncommon. Indeed, when I very first started to learn law - Roman Law was a compulsory subject for a law degree and the paper was written in Latin. I had come across Latin as a schoolboy, but I wasn’t very good at it. You will, therefore, understand my great relief when the law degree requirement for a pass in Roman Law was abolished very soon after I started my legal studies.

If you are thinking about advancing your legal career, you have choices. It’s a good idea to review the different roles and which route you might take.

There are two traditional legal professionals in England, Wales and Northern Ireland: solicitors and barristers. Both are statutorily regulated professions, meaning both have membership bodies and regulatory bodies and the only people who can refer to themselves as ‘solicitors’ or ‘barristers’ are those who have been through the prescribed training process for either profession. Indeed, it is illegal to refer to oneself as a solicitor or barrister without formally being on the solicitors’ or barristers’ register.

At the end of last year, SecsintheCity published a motivational piece entitled “5 Key Attributes of a Great PA”. This article showed what qualities PAs have and gave readers an idea of what skills and characteristics they need to excel in the role. Based on the success of this piece, in collaboration with The Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs, their sister site, TotallyLegal wanted to expand on this topic further and talk about the key attributes of a Legal PA.

Whether you know it or not, you have a preference in regards to managing your time. It’s no different than liking pineapple on your pizza or preferring period dramas to sitcoms. It’s just part of who you are.

Those who struggle with time management often either don’t understand their time style preferences or actively try to work against it because they think the way they’re doing it is wrong.

Although resigning from a position can be a daunting prospect for most people, it’s actually very common, especially at the start of the year.

In fact, data from website ‘Statista’ found that ‘in the first quarter of 2022 approximately 354,000 job-to-job resignations took place in the United Kingdom, which was one of the highest number of resignations taking place in a single quarter during this provided time period.’

But even if the prospect is a welcome one, it’s important to follow the best practice when handing in your notice to ensure leave your position with appropriate courtesy and respect. Part of doing this correctly is by handing in a formal resignation letter that includes all the necessary information regarding your departure from the company.

In the increasingly complex world of the private client lawyer there are many challenges, both old and new. This month we will consider four of these potentially challenging areas and review what recent developments have occurred. 

Capacity

The longstanding test to establish if someone has mental capacity to make a Will is set down in “Banks v Goodfellow 1870”. However, since the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) 2005 came into force there have been several (unsuccessful) cases challenging whether the MCA should replace the “Banks” case as the test for mental capacity. For the moment the “Banks” test remains the one the Courts will use and, in simple terms, establishes that a person must:

In a previous article we considered four “basic” skills that any legal secretary should have – communication, discretion, organisational and I.T. This month we will highlight some further skills and consider how to create a development plan to fill any gaps you may have.

Document management

After the pandemic reshaped the universal approach to working arrangements, many more of us have been reaping the benefits that remote work can offer. Between the 24 million people who were believed to be working from home during the pandemic, they saved an estimated £1 billion every week on costs related to going into the office. As such, it’s understandable that when moving jobs, you may want to hold on to the freedom and flexibility that comes with this more modern set up.

Whilst you could want these reassurances during the interview, it can be a potentially tricky subject to broach.

There are many employees who are fooled by their job titles. An estimated 200,000 plus paralegals work in a variety of fields and for diverse employers, who are unaware that they are paralegals and can apply for membership of a professional body, giving them status.

Identifying a paralegal

This is simple: does the work they do involve any sort of legality? For example, are they involved in drafting or reviewing commercial contracts or employment contracts? Do they do any legal research to assist someone in their department? Are they involved in compliance or regulation ensuring that statutory criteria are adhered to? Are they involved in reviewing documents in relation to childcare proceedings?

Zoom interviews are becoming more commonplace in today's digital age. Conducting video interviews has numerous advantages:

Since the employee does not have to travel, video interviews save time and money.

Every administrative professional needs a procedures manual.

Procedures are documented processes that explain exactly how to complete a task. They help you provide consistent customer service, make it easier for you to delegate tasks, and showcase the value you bring to your organisation.

When I talk about procedures, most people think of a physical binder sitting on a desk or bookshelf. And you should absolutely have one of those. It’s easy to grab your binder, look up a procedure or refer to a checklist, and get on with your day.

But from a disaster preparedness standpoint, only having a physical binder is risky. What happens if there’s a fire? Or a pipe bursts and floods your office? Or you have to work from home?

SecsintheCity, the UK’s number one specialist job site for PAs, EAs and business support professionals, has published the results of its 2023 salary survey. Over 1,500 professionals detailed the intricate insights of their working lives, shining a light on salaries, bonuses and benefits.

To bring in 2023, TotallyLegal surveyed over 900 legal professionals to understand the finer details of their working lives, including salaries, bonuses and job satisfaction. The feedback and results revealed an educated and experienced audience covering a range of roles, including the valued Legal PA and Legal Secretary niche.

It is with great pleasure that we announce our new partnership with The Institute of Legal Finance and Management (ILFM). As two organisations committed to the education, progression, and recognition of those working as support staff in the legal sector, we are proud to have a partnership that enables us to raise awareness of the invaluable work these individual specialists do in the profession.   

Emma Stacey, ILSPA’s Chief Executive commented:

The Royal Courts of Justice has offered our Students and Members a 30% discount on its tours. Visiting the RCJ is a wonderful experience where Students’ course material comes to life and they can get an inside look at a real-life working courtroom. Students and Members will also have the opportunity to join the RCJ’s new Half-Day Legal London tour when places are offered to us. This is a legal walking tour which combines a tour of inside the fabulous Royal Courts of Justice with a walk through some of London’s beautiful Inns of Court. Please keep an eye on our Legal Secretary Blog for available dates over the coming months.