What Does a Legal Secretary Do? Legal Secretary Career Guide

A legal secretary's work is preparing the paperwork a law office runs on.

In federal employment statistics the role sits inside the occupation of legal secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6012), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes legal secretaries as preparing summonses, complaints, motions, subpoenas and other legal documents under the supervision of an attorney or a paralegal, and helping with research such as verifying quotes and citations in briefs.

The occupation label is broader than the secretary alone: the federal count covers legal secretaries and administrative assistants together, so the 157,600 jobs and the wage figures in this guide describe that combined group rather than one title.

Keep the grouping in mind whenever a number in this guide is quoted — it is a number for the group.

That supervision clause is the spine of the BLS description.

The work moves through an attorney or a paralegal: the supervisor directs the work, and the secretary produces the finished, accurately formatted documents.

That is the line between this desk and the paralegal role, which the American Bar Association defines as performing "specifically delegated substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible."

The paralegal carries the substance of a case; the secretary carries its production.

The paralegal career guide covers that role in depth.

This page uses the BLS occupation as its anchor because it is the definition with federal numbers behind it — a job count, wages, an outlook — and treats every other label for the desk as employer usage, which the sections below untangle.

The BLS description names the documented core of the job, and it is worth reading closely because it draws the line between the secretary's work and the supervising attorney's or paralegal's:

• Preparing legal documents. Summonses, complaints, motions, subpoenas and other legal documents — the papers that start a case, move it through the court and compel evidence — prepared under the supervision of an attorney or a paralegal. The craft here is production: clean formatting, correct assembly from the supervisor's direction, versions that match, deadlines met.
• Verifying quotes and citations. The research support BLS names is specific: checking the quotes and citations in briefs. That is close-reading work — confirming that language attributed to a court or a statute reads the way the brief says it reads — and it is the kind of detail work where the secretary's care is the safety net.
• Working under attorney or paralegal supervision. Both named duties share one structure: an attorney or a paralegal directs the substance, and the secretary executes it. The secretary's side of that structure is accuracy, format and follow-through.

Read together, the two duties describe document-centered work in direct support of casework.

Where a specific job extends beyond that core is a question for each employer's posting to answer.

The contrast with the next desk up is instructive.

BLS's profile of paralegals and legal assistants lists investigating case facts, researching laws and regulations, drafting correspondence and documents such as contracts, helping at trial with exhibits, filing documents with courts and agencies, and scheduling interviews, meetings and depositions among that role's typical duties.

Those are documented paralegal tasks — the substantive side of the structure the supervision clause describes — and seeing the two BLS duty lists side by side is a reliable way to tell the desks apart in a posting.

Yes.

The federal government still keeps the occupation in its own count: BLS reported 157,600 jobs for legal secretaries and administrative assistants in 2025, and publishes wages, training and outlook for the group.

Whatever labels individual firms use, this is the title the job counts are kept under.

The direction, though, is down.

BLS projects employment to fall from 157,600 in 2025 to 149,300 in 2035 — a 5% decline of 8,300 jobs — and points to technology, including AI systems and digital tools that let staff prepare their own documents, as a reason employment is projected to decline for secretaries.

In BLS's own framing it is a projection about where document work is heading, not a finding that the desks have already disappeared.

The label is moving too.

The American Bar Association dropped the term legal assistant from its definition of paralegal when its House of Delegates adopted the current definition at the February 2020 Midyear Meeting, to reflect the substantive work paralegals perform.

NALA, a paralegal association, still treats legal assistant and paralegal as synonymous terms and says state supreme court rules, statutes, ethics opinions and bar guidelines define them that way.

And usage varies from employer to employer, even as the federal count keeps the occupation under one name.

For the federal statistics, there is no line to draw: BLS counts legal secretaries and administrative assistants as a single occupation — one SOC code, one job count, one median wage, one outlook covering both labels (SOC 43-6012).

The label that actually needs untangling is legal assistant.

NALA treats legal assistant and paralegal as synonymous terms, yet usage varies by employer, and firms often use legal assistant for a secretarial role.

The legal assistant career guide covers that role on its own terms.

The practical consequence for a job seeker is simple: the same title can mean different desks at different employers, and the duties section of a posting tells you which desk you are looking at.

The comparison with real consequences is with the paralegal role, because that boundary is defined rather than stylistic.

The ABA definition ties paralegals to "specifically delegated substantive legal work for which a lawyer is responsible," while the secretary's documented duties — document preparation and research support under supervision — sit on the production side of that line.

A legal administrative assistant title, like a legal secretary title, is best judged by which side of that line its duties fall on.

The most concrete documented fact about entering the field is about the ramp, not a credential: BLS says medical and legal secretaries may train for several months as they learn industry-specific terminology and practices, and describes the on-the-job training typical for general secretaries as a few weeks.

The difference is the vocabulary — the names of the documents, the filing conventions, the language of a practice area — and BLS frames it as learning done on the desk.

The documented duties tell you what to be good at before you apply.

Document production — careful formatting, careful assembly — and the close reading that catches a citation that does not match its source are the two skills the documented duties center on.

Both can show in application materials: the way a resume describes document work, the precision of a cover letter, the details you can speak to in an interview.

A resume that names the documents it produced — the summonses, the motions, the briefs it citation-checked — speaks this role's language in a way a generic office-administration resume does not.

The postings for the roles you want are the checklist — they show what each employer asks for.

Use them to target your preparation instead of assuming one fixed entry route.

The federal benchmark comes from BLS: legal secretaries and administrative assistants earned a median annual wage of $55,570 in May 2025.

The median is the middle of the occupation — half earned more, half earned less — and it covers the combined occupation, secretaries and administrative assistants in legal settings, not one employer type, city or seniority level.

Treat it as a national middle, not an offer: the median prices the occupation, and any individual paycheck lands on its own side of it.

That is why the detailed figures live on their own page rather than here — for the figures behind this one, see the legal secretary salary page.

The legal secretary jobs page lists current openings as employers post them.

Two checks from this guide travel well into the search.

Read the duties, not the title — usage varies by employer, and the duties tell you which desk a posting actually is.

And look for the supervision structure: document preparation and research support under an attorney's or paralegal's direction is the documented shape of the role, so a posting that reads that way is describing the job this page covers.

Career information, not legal advice. The pay and outlook figures on this page are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook for legal secretaries and administrative assistants (SOC 43-6012) — May 2025 wages and the 2025–35 projections; check bls.gov for current figures.