Administrative Assistant Reception

Job Description

Job Description

The initial hiring is a reception/clerical/floating secretarial position. It is designed as a training program to elevate and evolve the candidate to a full executive administrative assistant. Depending upon the candidate’s desire and progress, the position can move the candidate to a potential administrative office manager position.

The initial phase of the position is to train the candidate in the fields of law in which the firm is presently engaged. The candidate will be required to handle basic receptionist and initial communications with all people contacting the office. The candidate must learn how to respond to clients and meet or manage their expectations. This is difficult as clients are often seeking legal advice because they are encountering consequences from their prior actions, and they like neither the consequences nor having to seek help.

The candidate will be required to learn how the mail system works. While that sounds incredibly simple, there are ethical and technical aspects of those tasks which are integral to the actual practice of law. They are the foundation of the attorney-client relationship and work product. While these tasks or functions ought to be mastered quickly and efficiently, their importance cannot be undermined. In addition, they provide a source for learning more about the firm and its function.

The candidate will be trained in the filing and file maintenance process. This requires becoming proficient with the firm case management program CLIO. It requires becoming familiar with the firm’s physical and manual filing system. The systems are redundant only because certain types of documents must be preserved as originals or must be physically created for courtroom representation. This requires on-the-job training, which is best learned through the clerical filing process. In addition to the CLIO system, which is internal to the firm, the candidate will need to learn and become proficient in the State of RI Odyssey filing system and the State of Rhode Island Judicial Portal System, which is the State’s judicial case management program. While they are related, they are also interdependent. The candidate will need to learn the same systems for the State of Florida and Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Florida and Massachusetts use county-wide and district-based geographic systems of jurisdiction, so each division and county has slightly different rules and protocols.

The candidate will be trained and learn the United States Bankruptcy and United States District Court local rules for filing in the State of Rhode Island, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the State of Florida Northern and Middle Districts. Local Rules are an animal all to themselves, and the filing system is through a program called “Pacer”.

All of these Court systems use a similar but different platform, and they take time to learn and time to learn their applicability to the firm's clients and their matters.

Simultaneously with this training, the candidate will work with the probate and estate planning attorney(s). Each city and town in RI has a separate Probate Court with its own local rules. While they are all very similar, there are distinctions, and the distinctions matter.

The firm also has a busy land use practice. This involves filing applications with the different cities and towns for variances, zone changes, ordinance writing and amendments, appeals to the Superior Court from adverse decisions, and general guidance to clients through the land development practice. This land development practice can range from seeking a deck on the back of your home to the development of the University Orthopedics clinical surgical center planned in your town of Smithfield.

You will be required to learn all of this and also fill in the basic secretarial pool requirements of typing, editing, revising, and correcting attorney-drafted documents.

You will learn and be responsible for general calendar maintenance. Attorneys live and work based upon their calendars. Their updates and accuracy are vital. Each secretary handles their attorney’s personal calendars. Your position requires you to oversee that these are always conjoined at the hip.

The goal of this initial position is for you to become so proficient at it that you can train another to fill this position and have you move to becoming a full-time Executive Assistant to an attorney or two. While this requires a detailed understanding and application of the foregoing tasks, it becomes more granular in that the quintessential Executive Assistant becomes symbiotic with the Attorney. The Attorney truly cannot function without the full support of their Admin. What is imperative to learn is that the Attorney cannot perform this job. Attorneys do not know or understand the intrinsic details of court rules, court calendaring, or court system filing protocols. The Attorney relies 100% on his Executive legal assistant to accomplish these tasks and goals.

The office management position requires full understanding of both these functions and more. It requires an understanding of the accounting and billing systems, an understanding of cash flow, an intrinsic understanding of each attorney’s role in the firm, and then an ability to serve as HR, Full administration, oversight of all paper generated, oversight of cases and their management, and essentially the Chief Operating Officer of a professional service business. We have described it as managing attorneys-which is the equivalent of herding arrogant cats, supervising Executive Assistants-who are taking orders from the cats and yet having to follow your directives, managing client expectations-which means telling them the problems they created for themselves such that they need attorneys and cannot always work out the way they want them to.