Legal Assistant, Paralegal, Legal Secretary

What's in a name? Many professions are known by a variety of titles. For instance, the terms attorney and lawyer are interchangeable, as are doctor and physician. Of course, in the professional world of legal assistants, paralegals, and legal secretaries, the terms and titles have become interchangeable but at the price of clarity.

There was a time when the terms legal secretary, paralegal and legal assistant were as different as apples to oranges. Today the differences between the three professions are almost impossible to discern. Before we dive in to uncover the differences, let us first investigate what the responsibilities are for each of the three titles.

In 1997 the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates adopted the following definition of a legal assistant or paralegal, "A legal assistant or paralegal is a person, qualified by education, training, or work experience who is employed or retained by a lawyer, law office, corporation, governmental agency or other entity and who performs specifically delegated substantive work for which a lawyer is responsible." This is the most commonly approved definition of the various legal organizations.

Paralegals can be employed almost everywhere law-related work is performed. Paralegals either work with attorneys who assume professional responsibility for the final work product, or work in areas where "lay" individuals are explicitly authorized by statute or regulation to assume certain law-related responsibilities.

Typically experienced legal assistants perform legal and factual research, conduct client interviews, locate and interview witnesses, summarize depositions and testimony as well as attend hearings with an attorney. Time for this substantive legal work performed by a paralegal or a legal assistant can be billed to the client on an hourly basis.

Legal secretaries were once responsible for a majority of the clerical work performed in a law office, leaving the lawyer to concentrate on those tasks requiring a thorough knowledge of the law.

It is at the entry level for a paralegal that the confusion begins. Oftentimes paralegals get a foot in the door doing clerical work for attorneys to gain valuable experience. In most instances, this eventually leads to promotion to positions with more paralegal-type responsibilities. These jobs generally have titles like legal assistant or legal secretary, and it is difficult even for them to distinguish between their legal assistant work and secretarial tasks.

Recent research into the title dilemma found that more attorneys are choosing to refer to their secretaries as legal assistants. While attorneys want their secretaries to continue to do word processing, scheduling, taking client calls and other duties normally thought of as secretarial in nature, they also want them to do as much paralegal work as possible, including conducting basic research, drafting legal documents and pleadings and having more client contact.

The bottom line is that while the titles are almost synonymous, the duties differ from employer to employer. Luckily there is a plethora of career opportunities available for all qualified legal professionals, but in the absence of definitive titles, the title may not accurately describe the associated duties, tasks and responsibilities of the position.