How To Survive As A Legal Secretary

This strategy is admittedly a bit hard to implement.

secretary typist typewriterWe’ve written in these pages before about the yawning chasm between lawyers and “non-lawyers” in Biglaw. It’s an unfortunate and damaging divide that doesn’t do anyone any good.

Many Above the Law readers work in law firms in non-legal or staff capacities, and we greatly appreciate their insights and information. Here’s an interesting email we recently received from one such reader:

I have worked for large law firms since 1994, and I, and a large number of my colleagues, read Above the Law often, if not daily. As you are probably aware, many of the items that interest the legal side of the house also interest the administrative staff, but usually in a very different light.

For instance, the increase to a $180,000 starting salary for associates is definitely seen with trepidation by general staff. We know the layoffs (“early retirements”) are coming. We just hope it’s not us.

Your Best Law Firms to Work For piece was interesting in that at least three of the top ten are a nightmare to work for if you’re in the IT or Billing/Finance departments. This is based not just on my personal experience, but on the reported experiences of many of my co-workers.

Reputations of firms from a staff perspective are communicated, verified, and passed on in our little community. We take care of our own, as it appears firms either don’t know and/or don’t care how they’re perceived from our point of view.

This probably comes as no surprise to you, but just thought I would put it out there.

The past few years have been hard on administrative personnel at law firms. Just scroll through our past stories on staff layoffs, and you’ll see a slew of reductions in the ranks of secretaries, paralegals, and other staff (including at least two reports from the post-$180K period). Firms claim that, thanks to advances in technology and in lawyer comfort levels with tech, they simply don’t need as many staffers as they used to.

So how can one survive as, say, a legal secretary? A fun profile in the Sunday New York Times of one high-profile legal secretary provides one possible path:

“I’ll be right with you, Mr. Morgenthau,” Ida Van Lindt said to her boss, Robert M. Morgenthau, the famously longstanding Manhattan district attorney who retired in 2009.

Ms. Van Lindt, 77, worked for him for his entire 35 years as D.A. Before that, she served 17 years for his predecessor Frank S. Hogan, in whose office she began working in the stenography pool in 1956.

She occupied narrow offices outside her bosses’ much larger ones, and still does. She and Mr. Morgenthau left their government jobs in 2009 and moved together to [Wachtell Lipton] on West 52nd Street, where Mr. Morgenthau advises, sits on numerous boards and works on special cases….

She can still order Mr. Morgenthau’s lunch without asking him — his default choice is tuna salad with a lot of vegetables.

She still signs his checks, and since he does not use a computer, she tends his emails, printing them out for him.

“He likes everything on hard copy,” said Ms. Van Lindt, who keeps an electric typewriter on hand, for checks and other odd tasks.

Ida Van Lindt’s secret to job security: find a 96-year-old boss who doesn’t use a computer.

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Alas, as younger lawyers embrace technology, this particular path isn’t easy to follow. But Van Lindt’s experience can be translated into advice of broader applicability: make yourself indispensable to your boss, your colleagues, or your organization.

As legendary litigator David Boies memorably put it, law firms are not eleemosynary institutions. They don’t exist to provide charity or to give out jobs to people who otherwise couldn’t find employment.

If you want to survive at a law firm, make it so that the law firm can’t survive without you.

She’s Still on the Case [New York Times]

Earlier: The Wall Between Lawyers And Non-
The Biglaw ‘Caste System’ — An Impediment To Innovation?
The Best Law Firms To Work For: Biglaw ‘Quality Of Life’ Rankings

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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.