Legal Secretaries need Microsoft Office Skills

Office professionals need to have Microsoft Office Skills. However, each type of office professional or those aspiring to the job do not understand what Microsoft Office skills are key to their roles. Each profession has specific Microsoft requirement and you need to develop them in order to be
successful in interviews and your jobs.

Here is an outline of why and how Microsoft office programs are used in Legal Secretarial work. This does not mean that every Legal Secretary uses these programs in exactly the same way; some may only use Word and Outlook. However, this is cutting across a section the industry and look at a range of Legal professionals.

 

 

One of the main Microsoft programmes for any legal secretary or many related support professional is of course the word processor, Microsoft Word. This is used to write letter, create specially template legal documents and for a lot of the typing. You will need to have a lot of capability in the programme to be a Legal Secretary. This means the ability to use advanced functions such as margins, tab and formatting.

 

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Microsoft Outlook is very important to any secretarial role and any office job. Naturally, in a legal secretarial role you will need to be excellent at using your email function in this programme. This is because you many need proof of delivery and much more. However, you will also need to schedule
your manager’s or fee earner’s day using the diary function in Outlook. Scheduling the production of documents can also be done in Outlook, which means that this is very important to your role. Be sure to develop advanced skills.

 

You may need to help fee earners in developing their presentation slides and this is more frequently being placed onto support staff. In this case, you will gain form the ability to use PowerPoint well.

 

Some costs and numerical data can be stored, so you will need to be able to use excel. It is not the case that you need to be an excel wizard but as knowledge will help you through your career.

 

Some law firms may have their details and information stored in databases and some will use Access. A working knowledge of Microsoft Access will help you in this case.

 

There will be other programmes that are used by law firms, this will depend on the nature of the work.

 

 

To find out more about training to start a career as a Legal Secretary go to www.souterstraining.com/ilex-courses.