Fellow blogger Jordan Furlong has an excellent blog post about the potential role of legal secretaries. I’ve written about this topic as well and am glad to have another voice join in.
In Legal secretaries 2.0 at law21.ca, Furlong picks up on one firm’s idea of assigning secretaries specialties. He suggests that “allowing secretaries to focus on and develop expertise in one particular area creates clear channels through with assignments can flow much more easily and efficiently.” Moreover, he believes in “up skilling” and that secretaries should be “trained professionals with the talent and motivation to constantly move up the value chain.”
I agree completely and have made similar suggestions:
- In Powering a KM Windmill (“Baking KM into the System”), Chris Boyd of Wilson Sonsini and I suggested that secretaries could play a much bigger role in manual knowledge management work.
- In The Future of Legal Secretaries — Working Groups?, I observed that “working groups would also allow specialization by function and/or seniority.”
- In The Business Case to Outsource Secretarial and Document Production Tasks I suggested that outsourcing document-intensive work would allow secretaries to re-focus on higher value tasks.
If firms lay-off lawyers, as some already have, staff may not be far behind. It’s a potential opportunity for firms to re-consider the role of secretaries, focusing on keeping the ones who really add value. Of course, firms don’t have to wait for bad times to execute good ideas, but exogenous shocks often force change.