The Legal Secretaries Diploma is studied by a wide range of students of varying ages and different backgrounds. Whether you are young and just starting out in your career or you are an experienced professional and want solid career direction, our course is suited to you. One of our students, Annabel Hammond, proves the latter. We were very pleased to see that she achieved a distinction for our course with a result of 99%. This is an extremely high achievement and shows that Annabel has great attention to detail and an excellent understanding of law and legal procedures.
Annabel enjoyed the course and thought that her age and experience contributed to her success. We hope that her achievement provides inspiration for our mature students. Here are Annabel’s comments on her result:
Firstly, thank you to Maria for the prompt return of my results and portfolio, and for the assistance on the occasions that I got stuck during the course; I am very pleased to have achieved the result that I did and thrilled and surprised that it was the highest result.
I guess age and experience helped a good deal; I am 52 and have worked in various admin/secretarial jobs up until 1990, when I took time out to raise a family and follow my husband wherever his career took him. In 2006 I wanted to get back into work and managed to join a property management company, where I dealt with the Company Secretarial duties associated with residents’ management companies and also the maintenance of property owner records. This brought me into contact with solicitors dealing with property transfers/assents and the associated documents that had to come through my department – Deeds of Covenant, Licences to Assign, new Leases, Lease extensions, Grants of Probate. I found this side of the work very interesting; I have a good attention to detail and, as my experience grew in dealing with legal documents, I started to think that I would enjoy working as a legal secretary. A search on the Internet brought up the ILSPA website and I liked the look of the syllabus, how it was possible to study from home, and the supportive and informative nature of the website.
I thought the course was well set out and straightforward to follow; it was a bit daunting at first as the course material in the first three units was completely new to me. It’s a lot of information to take in, but I took heart from the note at the top of the tests that said it was about understanding the information rather than memorising it. Knowing that the answers to the test questions had to be somewhere within the course material, I just kept re-reading until I grasped the answer – when that didn’t work, I emailed Maria for extra guidance. When it came to the assessments, again it was all clearly set out, so I mostly just needed care and attention in following the instructions and double-checking everything. My work experience gave me an advantage on the assessments for Units 4 and 5 because I was used to writing and receiving letters and documents from solicitors and also dealing with Land Registry.
I enjoyed how the course gave good general background knowledge of the legal system as relevant to a legal secretary; armed with my diploma I will now try my luck with the local firms of solicitors.
The Legal Secretary Journal
