Vol. 3, No. 5, Pg. 22. Legal Assistants=Legal Assistance.

• Author: By Valorie M. Songer and Deborah L. Thompson

South Carolina Lawyer

1992.

Vol. 3, No. 5, Pg. 22.

Legal Assistants=Legal Assistance

22Legal Assistants=Legal AssistanceBy Valorie M. Songer and Deborah L. Thompson"A competitive legal market, the technology explosion and the goal of providing affordable legal services to the public combine to make employment of legal assistants a necessity in the nineties."

Legal assistants have become an integral part of law practice in the 1990s. A law firm or corporate legal department operating without legal assistants is operating at lower efficiency and less profitably than one which uses legal assistants. A competitive legal market, the technology explosion and the goal of providing affordable legal services to the public combine to make employment of legal assistants a necessity in the nineties.

Legal assistants can help in the areas of improved communications, case management, document preparation, information gathering and management, and legal and factual research.

Many corporate clients ask about the use of a firm's legal assistants when interviewing prospective counsel. Legal assistants should be introduced and their role carefully explained to clients. A legal assistant who is actively involved in a lawyer's practice can be an asset in communicating with clients, as long as the communications are supervised by a lawyer. Clients soon learn that an efficient legal assistant can answer questions or update them on matters the lawyer is handling for them.

Use of a legal assistant can produce higher income for a lawyer. Legal assistants should spend their work time in productive tasks that can be billed to clients. In a practice based on legal services billed on the basis of time spent, a legal assistant's time should be recorded and billed at an appropriate hourly rate. Billing rates for legal assistants in the Southeast generally range from $35 to $75 per hour, depending on the complexity of the task and the legal assistant's expertise. In a law practice based on fees for services, work performed by legal assistants can improve profitability. Legal assistants used by lawyers in consumer intensive practices and legal service clinics also can help to provide affordable legal services.

Hiring, Training and Managing

The growth in demand for qualed legal assistants has been matched by the creation of legal assistant training programs. A number of educational programs exist for legal assistants in South Carolina and surrounding states, including several that have received an approval rating from the ABA. The trend today is to require higher levels of education than in the past--specifically, completion of college at the associate or bachelor's degree level. Professional legal assistant associations are active in South Carolina's major cities, and...