Handbook for Beginning Legal Assistants and Receptionists

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource for a Beginning Corporate/Legal Secretary
Review: As an office manager, I found this handbook useful in training a receptionist with no law office experience. This handbook consists of seven parts. The most beneficial aspects of this handbook are Parts I-III, "General Information about Law," "Legal Vocabulary" and "Principles of Legal Office Management." These sections pack a lot of useful information into 82 pages. Parts IV and V, "Courtroom Procedures" and "Legal Opinions, Testimony, Trial by Jury," were not much help inasmuch as most legal secretaries do not accompany the attorney to trial, nor do they attend depositions. If working as a legal secretary for a "corporate attorney," one may find Part VI, "Business Law Concepts," to be an excellent resource for detailed explanations of terminology and business law concepts. Finally, Part VII, "Legal Documents," would again be an excellent resource for the corporate legal secretary. As far as providing guidelines for other types of legal documents, this section is severely lacking. For instance, there are no samples of transmittal letters, deposition notices, discovery requests, etc. -- the types of documents one would train a beginning legal secretary to compose. Nonetheless, Parts I-III made this handbook worth the purchase price.

Rating:
Summary: I was disappointed...
Review: I was disappointed in the Handbook for Beginning Legal Assistants and Receptionists. When I bought the book, I didn't realize that the copywright date was 1989, but I wish I had because some of the information seemed outdated. I also noticed quite a few typographical errors in the book, which didn't help me trust the content.