What does a senior legal assistant do?
Senior legal assistants are responsible for managing junior-level assistants. They also support lawyers with various legal tasks such as conducting legal research, drafting documents, and hearing trials. These assistants must work with attorneys and clients to review various legal documents to ensure their accuracy and completeness. They gather documents for attorneys and prepare witnesses scheduled for court hearings. Senior legal assistants must also arrange the delivery of subpoenas while preparing the required affidavit of service.
Senior legal assistant responsibilities
Here are examples of responsibilities from real senior legal assistant resumes:
- Perform administrative tasks for managing partner and trial attorney at a medical malpractice litigation firm including daily transcription and stenography.
- Handle collections, probate, estate planning, real estate and corporate work.
- Interview witnesses, prepare declarations, and draft responses to interrogatories and requests for production.
- Prepare lawsuits from complaint through judgment and garnishment for foreclosures, probate, and loss mitigation.
- Develop numerous PowerPoint presentations for conferences and teachings.
- Develop PowerPoint presentations, reports and legal documents.
- Prepare various legal documents including interrogatories, discovery demands and closing documents.
- Review all incoming subpoenas, document production and discovery requests and coordinate responses with appropriate units.
- Ensure that time sensitive litigation court relate filings strictly adhere to federal and state civil procedural guidelines.
- Provide support to several attorneys in defense litigation proceedings and improve customer service by building stronger rapport with clients.
- Develop cases by scheduling depositions, arbitration, preparing and forwarding citations and subpoenas, drafting motion and discovery.
- Answer and propound discovery/mandatory disclosure/financial affidavits.
- Analyze and manually correct output create by automate systems that are unable to update SSA records due to systems limitations.
- Prepared/Review legal documents which consist of real estate foreclosure such as preparing alias summonses and publication documents.
- Process claims for SSA beneficiaries and make final determinations for adjudicative actions, entitlement and non-entitlement issues.
Senior legal assistant skills and personality traits
We calculated that 15% of Senior Legal Assistants are proficient in Litigation, Legal Research, and Legal Correspondence. They’re also known for soft skills such as Communication skills, Computer skills, and Research skills.
We break down the percentage of Senior Legal Assistants that have these skills listed on their resume here:
- Litigation, 15%
Provided support to several attorneys in defense litigation proceedings and improved customer service by building stronger rapport with clients.
- Legal Research, 7%
Conducted legal research, prepared medical treatment abstracts and analysis in injury matters and coordinated compilation of treatment and billing records.
- Legal Correspondence, 6%
Experienced case manager in preparation of legal correspondence for immigrant and non- immigrant visas.
- Legal Support, 5%
Provided legal support to Visa's marketing department to implement Visa-branded promotional programs.
- Discovery Responses, 5%
Prepared discovery responses, performed factual investigation, and analyzed medical and employment records.
- Subpoenas, 5%
Reviewed all incoming subpoenas, document production and discovery requests and coordinated responses with appropriate units.
Common skills that a senior legal assistant uses to do their job include "litigation," "legal research," and "legal correspondence." You can find details on the most important senior legal assistant responsibilities below.
Communication skills. To carry out their duties, the most important skill for a senior legal assistant to have is communication skills. Their role and responsibilities require that "paralegals must be able to document and present their research and related information to their supervising attorney." Senior legal assistants often use communication skills in their day-to-day job, as shown by this real resume: "demonstrated strong communication skills with claimants and litigation attorneys. "
Computer skills. Many senior legal assistant duties rely on computer skills. "paralegals need to be familiar with using computers for legal research and litigation support," so a senior legal assistant will need this skill often in their role. This resume example is just one of many ways senior legal assistant responsibilities rely on computer skills: "performed computerized legal research to obtain and gather case-relevant data and materials. "
Research skills. This is an important skill for senior legal assistants to perform their duties. For an example of how senior legal assistant responsibilities depend on this skill, consider that "paralegals gather facts of the case and research information on relevant laws and regulations to prepare drafts of legal documents for attorneys and help them prepare for a case." This excerpt from a resume also shows how vital it is to everyday roles and responsibilities of a senior legal assistant: "performed extensive research on various corporate and litigation issues relating to bankruptcy law. ".
Interpersonal skills. A big part of what senior legal assistants do relies on "interpersonal skills." You can see how essential it is to senior legal assistant responsibilities because "paralegals spend most of their time working with clients and other professionals and must be able to develop good relationships." Here's an example of how this skill is used from a resume that represents typical senior legal assistant tasks: "demonstrated outstanding interpersonal skills in answering, relaying, screening, and placing telephone calls. "
Organizational skills. A commonly-found skill in senior legal assistant job descriptions, "organizational skills" is essential to what senior legal assistants do. Senior legal assistant responsibilities rely on this skill because "paralegals may be responsible for many cases at one time." You can also see how senior legal assistant duties rely on organizational skills in this resume example: "document drafting, court filings, administrative duties, e-mail correspondence, scheduling appointments and other organizational tasks. "
The three companies that hire the most senior legal assistants are:
- Ricoh12 senior legal assistants jobs
- Colgate-Palmolive6 senior legal assistants jobs
- RWJBarnabas Health3 senior legal assistants jobs
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Compare different senior legal assistants
Senior legal assistant vs. Law clerk
Law clerks are employees in a legal firm who handle clerical tasks for the office. They handle the office's official phone lines, answering incoming calls, and making outgoing calls. They also field office correspondence, often receiving incoming mail and distributing them to their addressees. They manage office documents and ensure that they are correctly filed and labeled in their respective storage bins. Law clerks help make office life more comfortable because they make sure that the office is running well. They also manage appointments and office calendars.
There are some key differences in the responsibilities of each position. For example, senior legal assistant responsibilities require skills like "legal correspondence," "legal support," "dictation," and "administrative tasks." Meanwhile a typical law clerk has skills in areas such as "legal memos," "pre-trial motions," "summary judgment," and "settlement agreements." This difference in skills reveals the differences in what each career does.
Law clerks really shine in the professional industry with an average salary of $98,674. Comparatively, senior legal assistants tend to make the most money in the professional industry with an average salary of $58,939.On average, law clerks reach similar levels of education than senior legal assistants. Law clerks are 0.6% less likely to earn a Master's Degree and 24.1% more likely to graduate with a Doctoral Degree.Senior legal assistant vs. Real estate paralegal
A Real Estate Paralegal helps real estate lawyers with a variety of tasks, such as offering advice to clients, doing research, and preparing documents. They collaborate with landlords, housing managers, or other real estate personnel.
While some skills are similar in these professions, other skills aren't so similar. For example, resumes show us that senior legal assistant responsibilities requires skills like "legal correspondence," "legal support," "discovery responses," and "dictation." But a real estate paralegal might use other skills in their typical duties, such as, "affidavits," "lenders," "sale agreements," and "settlement statements."
Real estate paralegals earn a higher average salary than senior legal assistants. But real estate paralegals earn the highest pay in the finance industry, with an average salary of $72,649. Additionally, senior legal assistants earn the highest salaries in the professional with average pay of $58,939 annually.real estate paralegals earn similar levels of education than senior legal assistants in general. They're 2.5% less likely to graduate with a Master's Degree and 24.1% less likely to earn a Doctoral Degree.Senior legal assistant vs. Paralegal
Paralegals are law firm or legal department employees who work on cases with lawyers. They handle different activities, usually administrative or clerical, such as organizing and maintaining files, updating records, and managing correspondences, among others. Paralegals also handle different activities directly related to active cases being worked on by lawyers in the firm or department. They assist lawyers on cases by preparing materials needed for trials, conducting legal research, verifying trial facts, helping during interviews, getting statements from those involved in the case, and creating presentation materials. Paralegals should have knowledge of laws and should be familiar with landmark cases.
Some important key differences between the two careers include a few of the skills necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of each. Some examples from senior legal assistant resumes include skills like "dictation," "administrative tasks," "expense reports," and "real estate transactions," whereas a paralegal is more likely to list skills in "affidavits," "real estate closings," "lexis," and "legal articles. "
Paralegals earn the best pay in the professional industry, where they command an average salary of $55,416. Senior legal assistants earn the highest pay from the professional industry, with an average salary of $58,939.When it comes to education, paralegals tend to earn similar degree levels compared to senior legal assistants. In fact, they're 1.2% less likely to earn a Master's Degree, and 0.1% less likely to graduate with a Doctoral Degree.Senior legal assistant vs. Contractor-paralegal
A Contractor-Paralegal works for a law firm or corporate legal department for a specified amount of time, or for a specified task. They can be specialized in the entertainment industry or in providing services to healthcare companies and insurance providers.
Types of senior legal assistant
Updated January 8, 2025
