Secretaries are still great for organization things, transcribing dictation, cover letters, etc. But the workload per attorney is just a lot less now.
You are right but that is exactly why it is a problem of note. I see more mistakes these days - even in legal docs - than EVER before. I am a former paralegal. Hubby and I had some legal business and I had to call the attorney about many typos and other grammatical errors. The attorneys are NOT secretaries, even though they think they are that. You can’t be everything!
Secretaries are still great for organization things, transcribing dictation, cover letters, etc. But the workload per attorney is just a lot less now.Secretaries have always been underrated. Nowadays a person thinks just because he/she can plunk away at a keyboard that THAT makes them a secretary. Not so. In the old days, especially for legal secretaries, you had to be very intelligent AND a fast typist.15 posted on April 28, 2011 11:59:08 AM EDT by Paved Paradise
. . . you just don't need as many as you used to, and that's being proven across the legal industry.
Many attorneys, particularly the younger ones, draft their own documents. Word processing programs make it easier to format them, and you can email or electronically file documents yourself with little additional effort.
The big deal about word processing is that it is so much easier to compose/edit a document that way than it is to cut and paste paper. That was what I wanted WP for, not for the formatting. I deliberately edited my copy of your post, specifically to illustrate my point. My edited version says the same thing as yours, in fewer words and is a little sharper (that's no reflection on you, people don't necessarily trouble to edit their posts on FR to the optimum; it's not usually worth it to them to do so).My point is that WP makes me a better writer than I was when I drafted documents longhand.
But wordsmithing is one thing, and formatting is another; formatting is a time sink. The trouble is that while in the past everyone made allowances for imperfections in formatting typewritten documents, with the advent of WP everyone knows that you could have tweaked the formatting a little better if you had taken a little more trouble. And there just seems to be no end to it.Same thing writing a program to do a technical analysis - a little program might take a bit of time to do, technically - maybe only a couple of days - but the next thing you know you have spent a week or two prettying up the output for a report.
So, yes to composition/editing on WP in preference to longhand - and no to the overuse of professional time to pretty up documents.