The Institute has a great team of people who help our Students achieve their goals. Maria Richards has been assisting Students with their queries and marking coursework for nearly eight years now. Her role within the company is of great value, and you can learn more about her here.
How did you become a Course Assessor with the Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs?
Assertiveness is a direct, honest and respectful way of behaving and interacting with others. It is seen as one of the most desirable forms of human behaviour as it leads to honest and healthy relationships. As a Legal Secretary, the ability to be assertive will help you greatly in your career to communicate effectively with your colleagues and boss.
There are generally three types of human behaviour – non-assertive, aggressive and assertive.
Non-assertive behaviour is submissive and indirect. It can give a message of inferiority by allowing the wants and needs of others to be more important than our own. A person behaving non-assertively will lose while allowing others to win.
How can you advance in your chosen career as a Legal Secretary? I am retired now, but when I was practicing law, over a period of very many years I developed a habit with regard to my Legal Secretaries: I encouraged them to act as a team and to see themselves as part of the bigger picture.
What is the bigger picture that a Legal Secretary is part of? It’s obvious, of course: a successful legal practice, or a successful legal department of a commercial firm or public organisation. It does not matter how brilliant a partner or senior manager may be; success will come only if the firm as a whole, from top to bottom, is brilliant. This means that everyone should be singing from the same song sheet. If Legal Secretaries were not important, then firms wouldn’t need to employ them! In their own way, they are just as important as the partners or senior managers.
Legal Secretary Vacancies January 2017
Here is a selection of vacancies from our Legal Secretary Jobs Board this month:
Legal Secretary – Picton Solicitors
Location: Tring
Salary: £22,000 plus benefits
Pictons Solicitors are looking for a Legal Secretary/Assistant for their Tring office. The successful candidate will be helping the Family Law fee earner with their duties, manning the reception and performing various other tasks.
View the full job description here:
https://www.institutelegalsecretaries.com/jobs/candidate/job/68944/
Part-Time Conveyancing Secretary/PA – Rosenberg & Co
If you are new to the subject of law, you will hear different terms apportioned to the professionals who work within our legal system, but not fully understand exactly what each of them do. Due to the glamorisation of our legal system in film and television, most people will have a concept of many of the legal professional roles; however, this article aims to help you to understand what each role entails and how you can work your way up the ladder.
Legal Secretaries
Can you imagine the difficulties you would face going through law school as a deaf person? The image in our heads is most probably one of us relying almost exclusively on our powers of sight to intake any information presented to us. Can you imagine, then, taking away the power of sight also? Now imagine that the law school in question is Harvard, noted as one of the top law schools in the world, regarded for both its remarkable academic excellence and prestigious previous alumni. This is the story of Haben Girma, a truly inspirational Eritrean-American woman who overcame these momentous hurdles and became the first deaf-blind graduate of Harvard Law School.
Excellence is about delivering work of quality and doing the best you can do at every moment. Success naturally follows for those who are prepared to go that extra mile in their job and are willing to devote their time and effort to bettering themselves. Excellence is brought about by doing things better than they have been done before, and only being satisfied with the very best from yourself.
If you are studying through the Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs, you will learn that the burden of proof in Criminal Law cases is set considerably higher than in other areas of law. In fact, there is a requirement for the Crown to prove a case against the defendant beyond all reasonable doubt.
In contrast, with civil cases, which make up the vast majority of legal cases and work dealt with in England, the burden is on the claimant to prove his or her case on the balance of probabilities.
In days of yore it was so much simpler – you were either married or you weren’t. The sanctity of marriage was the norm. You reached, say, your late teens or early twenties, you got engaged, and then you were married; whether you lived happily ever after was another matter. In those days, in both a sociological and a legal way, marriage was to be supported, and it was. Socially, marriage was the way in which families were created and fostered; consequently, the legal idea was that the sanctity of marriage had to be protected.
It is important to note that there have been a few changes to the structure of the civil courts system in England and Wales over the past 10 years or so, the most important of which occurred at the very top of this hierarchical chain with a change in name from the House of Lords to the Supreme Court. Also, there have been a few changes to the Family Court that primarily derived from Part II of the Crime and Courts Act 2013.
The best way to summarise the civil law courts system of England and Wales is to start from the bottom and work your way up the hierarchical chain. As we progress through the different levels of court, you will notice that the importance of the court becomes increasingly profound, especially each court’s ability to set precedents for the lower-ranking courts beneath them when decisions are made over important cases.
The County Court