 My name is Nicole Hoskins-Goudreau and I will be your instructor for Introduction to Legal Concepts. I've been a licensed attorney since 2002 and I have advanced training and trial advocacy and have worked in both criminal and civil legal environments, both as a prosecutor and as a private attorney. I've hired and worked with many legal secretaries in my career. I've also trained hundreds of future criminal justice professionals as a criminal justice instructor and have trained and designed continuing legal education programs for attorneys. I'm really excited to work with you in this course and I hope you enjoy yourself as much as I'm enjoying myself. A legal secretary is an administrative assistant just like any administrative assistant in any organization. The difference is a legal secretary is trained additionally in the field of law. The legal secretary serves in a clerical capacity but it's not uncommon in many small law offices for the legal secretary to also engage in some additional work like writing legal drafts or creating correspondence on behalf of the attorneys and some small offices. In fact, the legal secretary takes on a greater role working as a pseudo paralegal or an office manager. The line between paralegal and legal secretary is often blurred but the difference primarily is that a paralegal will generally have at least an associate's degree with some specialized legal training in a specific field of law or legal research. This course will present you with the basic training that you need for a new career as a legal secretary. After this course you'll be prepared to enter the field as a legal secretary. You can work in a variety of legal environments including a law firm or for a government agency for example a prosecutor's office or a public defender's office or even legal aid. You'll be able to work in a legal department of a corporation so you'll be working for in-house counsel. Or you can work with an insurance company or maybe a real estate company or in a real estate agency. There are other fields where basic knowledge of legal procedures would be of benefit to your employer so you could work in those areas as well. Let's talk about the job functions of a legal secretary and some of the daily tasks that you'll be performing. This will include delivery of legal paperwork to the courts and other attorneys. This doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be walking legal paperwork over to the courthouse but you'll certainly be coordinating the delivery of paperwork filings and things like that to the courts. This might include electronic filing or dealing with couriers or overnight delivery people. You'll be typing correspondence and other legal paperwork including letters, motions, pleadings, all of those things. You'll be maintaining the legal calendar. This means posting court dates, appointments, meetings and deadlines. Managing the legal calendar is among the most important things a legal secretary will do. There are serious consequences when an attorney misses a deadline so this is one of the most important aspects of your job and you'll be doing it regularly. You'll also be answering phones and emails, greeting clients and managing the billing and expenses. You'll be keeping track of expense reports for the attorneys for whom you work. You'll be generating invoices and managing the actual billing as it relates to your client files. You'll also be involved in office management. Legal secretaries work in office management especially in the smaller offices. You might actually be the person responsible for making sure that the office is running smoothly. You'll also be ordering supplies, dealing with vendors and making sure that the office has everything it needs to operate well. Legal secretaries will often have some specialized training in the same field of law as the attorney for whom they work. So if you work for a trial attorney for example, it's not uncommon that you might actually be in court with the attorney from time to time. You'll be a trusted member of the law firm and of the legal team so you must be precise in your work. You should pay great attention to detail and make sure that you're always proofreading your documents before they go out. You'll want to respect confidentiality requirements. This is something that's required not only by your employer but by the rules of professional conduct and there can be serious consequences for failing to do this. You should organize and classify and categorize paperwork according to the management system, the document management system and filing system that your office utilizes. In fact, depending on the size of your office, this might be something that you actually design. You might actually be designing a filing or management system. You'll want to use legal billing and accounting systems. You'll either be trained on those that your office already uses or you might be called upon to suggest some systems as well. And you should possess excellent judgment. You'll be dealing with a wide variety of individuals from clients to judges. And so you'll need to use excellent judgment in dealing with people, dealing with documents and managing your attorneys' calendars. So be prepared to extend your education if you'd like to remain in the field of law. Beyond that, beyond of a legal secretary, you could expand your education to that of a paralegal, for example, by obtaining an associate's degree or a bachelor's degree or a certification. Let's talk about the employment outlook for legal secretaries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012, the median pay for a legal secretary was about $47,000 per year, $46,990 to be exact. That equates to about $22.5 per hour, which is a pretty good salary. Now, there's no work-related experience required, meaning that you don't have to have any pre-knowledge to become a legal secretary. But the fact that you're taking this training is going to put you heads and above others who are wanting the same job. So you'll have some training going in. There will be some on-the-job training, although it depends on the office where you work. In some offices, there will be quite a bit. In other offices, there won't be quite as much. The number of jobs available in 2012 was $277,000, so there's a lot of opportunity available for those who want to be legal secretaries. In fact, the outlook indicates that the growth in this area is going to be about 17% between now and 2022, which is faster than the average, so there will be job opportunities available. And they're expected to add about 46,200 jobs between now and 2022, but I expect that it'll probably be even more as the economy changes and legal secretaries take on greater roles. There will probably be fewer paralegals and more legal secretaries. So this is a great field for you to be getting into.