Your article brings back so many memories. And you have it absolutely correct. A good legal secretary is worth her weight in gold and most of us could not navigate the procedural maze of the court system without their help in preparing the basic documents. I used to work for a major Philadelphia law firm. Unlike your boss, we were expected to bill 2800 hours a year and work on Saturdays and holidays wearing a suit (sport jacket and tie were considered too casual, even if there were no clients in the office.) We certainly didn’t go out to lunch and drink or spend time talking about our BMWs. There was too much work to do for all of us.
Having said all this, I started my career in Washington DC as an enforcement attorney for the SEC. Getting reliable support staff was always a challenge. Many of the secretaries and paralegals were excellent, but because it was hard to get fired from the government if you had a certain amount of tenure, we ended up with some doozies. After I had been there a year or two, we desperately needed a new secretary for the Assistant Director in my branch. We posted a notice of opening government wide and quickly received a sterling résumé. She was almost too good to be true. Her most recent position was with the Commission itself and the General Counsel‘s office. They provided glowing reviews.
She was a bit of a floater in terms of responsibilities, so all of us in my particular group quickly became aware of her capabilities (or maybe I should say lack thereof).She would show up for work sporadicallly at unpredictable hours. We never knew if or when she would arrive. Documents we produced for litigation often ran to the hundreds of pages and one of her responsibilities was to type up the revisions. (This was in the day and age before personal computers. Everything had to be redone by hand.) I quickly realized that when I gave her a marked up document, the final result came back almost unrecognizable. I frequently had to throw them away and go back to my original edited copy and start all over with someone else.
I was one of the people with a private office and did not share space with any of my colleagues. Sometimes I would go out to lunch and come back to find the lights off. When I turned them on, her head would appear from underneath my desk and look out at me. I never said anything. I just quietly closed the door and left until she vacated my office after finishing whatever she was doing. She also spent a fair amount of her time filing complaints with the EEOC representative for alleged sexual harassment. Something as simple as inadvertently bumping into her wandering through the narrow halls would quickly elicit a complaint of physical assault. For some reason she liked me, and because she could choose whatever attorney she wanted to represent her in connection with her complaints, I often found myself in the awkward position of presenting her “cases”.
In the early days I was perplexed about how someone so incompetent could have such a gold plated résumé. After awhile I realized that it was very difficult to fire a government employee with a certain number of years of experience behind them. Rather than going through the termination process, it was easier to give them a glowing recommendation and “promote“ them out of your department passing the problem onto someone else.
For those who have grown up with a steady diet of Perry Mason, Matlock, The Practice, or Boston Legal, the real world of law looks nothing like it is portrayed in popular media. There are characters at every level, and every position to scratch one’s head about . The real world is a lot messier (and far less efficient) than most people think about legal practice.
(P.S.: Lest you think I am beating up on legal secretaries and paralegals, I know well how valuable and essential the good ones are. I would hire you in a heartbeat just for the comic relief that you would provide on a daily basis, if nothing else. It is clear your talents are way underappreciated and underutilized.)
