Legal assistant job description template: duties, requirements and pay range

A legal assistant posting has six working parts: duties, qualifications, skills and software, pay and benefits, schedule, and how to apply.

Each gets its own block in the template below.

Start by writing the role into existence, because the title will not do it for you — BLS counts paralegals and legal assistants as one occupation (SOC 23-2011) and cannot separate the two titles in its wage data, so there is no federal wage series a candidate can check the title against.

Your duties block is the definition.

If you are still deciding whether the role is right for your firm — the level you need, where to source, how to screen — our guide to how to hire a legal assistant covers the decisions before the posting; this page is about writing it.

Core duties.

Write tasks a candidate can picture on day one, not adjectives: the correspondence that backs up, the deadlines that live in one person's head, the client calls that keep interrupting the attorney.

Hold every line to one test — does the posting make clear that a lawyer reviews the work?

Supervision belongs in the duties block rather than the fine print.

ABA Model Rule 5.3(b) puts a duty on any lawyer with direct supervisory authority over a nonlawyer to make reasonable efforts to ensure that person's conduct is compatible with the lawyer's professional obligations, and Comment [2] to the rule says supervision should account for the fact that nonlawyers lack legal training and are not subject to professional discipline.

The ABA writes the rule as a model; your state adopts its own version, so name the supervising attorney in the posting and confirm your state's rule with your state bar's ethics counsel.

The structure behind the duty — firm-wide measures under Rule 5.3(a) plus the direct supervisor's separate obligation — is in our guide to supervising non-lawyer staff under Rule 5.3.

Duties that earn their place on a legal assistant posting:

• Drafting correspondence, forms and discovery materials for attorney review
• Managing calendars, court deadlines and filing dates
• Preparing, organizing and maintaining client files and exhibits
• E-filing with the court and tracking confirmations
• Answering client calls and passing on case-status updates
• Running initial conflict checks and opening new matters
• Handling phones, scheduling and office correspondence
• Supporting billing with time entries

Client-contact duties need the most careful wording on this block.

ABA Formal Opinion 506 (June 7, 2023) says a lawyer may train and supervise a nonlawyer to conduct prospective-client intake — gathering initial facts, running an initial conflict check, obtaining the signature on the fee agreement — provided the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to the lawyer.

Whether that nonlawyer may answer a prospective client's specific question depends on the question, the opinion says, because Model Rule 5.5 bars lawyers from assisting unauthorized practice of law.

So write what the assistant gathers and records, never what they advise.

Our guide to paralegal UPL risks maps the same boundary in detail.

Qualifications and certifications.

Two wording decisions do most of the work in this block.

First, certificate versus certification: NALA distinguishes a certificate — completing a learning program — from certification, which validates mastery against a professional standard, so finishing a paralegal course does not make someone a certified paralegal; write the one you mean.

Second, required versus preferred: unless your firm genuinely requires a credential, list it under a preferred line, or you will screen out strong candidates who learned the work on the job.

What can you legitimately require?

There is no attorney-style license behind the title to verify: NFPA reports that no single authority oversees the paralegal profession in the U.S. and that, as of its writing, no state has paralegal licensure — while listing licensed legal paraprofessional programs as a separate category on its list (Arizona, Minnesota, Oregon and Utah appear there), a different role from the supervised assistant this template describes.

The checks that mean something in a posting are education, experience and voluntary certification.

What you will see on resumes:

• NALA's Certified Paralegal (CP) — open under its Category 1 eligibility to graduates of qualifying paralegal programs, from ABA-approved programs to paralegal programs of at least 60 semester hours with at least 15 semester hours of substantive legal courses.
• NFPA's CRP and RP — from its PCCE and PACE exams; NFPA says someone without substantive paralegal work experience is not eligible for either exam under its current criteria, so these signal verified experience.
• NALS's ALP, CLP and PP — Accredited Legal Professional, Certified Legal Professional and Professional Paralegal; NALS describes the ALP as a possible first step toward the CLP or PP.
• State-level voluntary certifications — NFPA's regulation page lists 16, so check the specifics with the issuing body before you require one.

One boundary that keeps this block honest: the ABA approves paralegal programs — it does not certify or license the people who complete them; NALA, NFPA and NALS certify individuals.

Verify any credential a candidate claims directly with the issuing body before you rely on it.

For the candidate-side view of training routes and credentials, our legal assistant career guide covers it.

Skills and software.

Name the systems your firm actually runs — your case management platform, document management, e-filing, time-and-billing — and split them into must-have-on-day-one versus willing-to-train.

A posting that names its real stack filters better than one that lists nothing.

Skills worth a line each: drafting that survives attorney review, deadline management, and confidentiality habits.

The confidentiality line is not filler — Comment [2] to Rule 5.3 makes instructing nonlawyer assistants on ethics, especially confidentiality, part of the lawyers' job for the assistants they employ, whether employee or independent contractor.

Skills tests.

If you screen with a writing or skills exercise, keep it short and run it on a mock file.

The FLSA defines "employ" to include "to suffer or permit to work," so a candidate producing real, usable work for the firm — a document the firm actually files, say — may be an employee owed wages; a short exercise on a mock file is the safer design.

The EEOC adds a second constraint: a required test must be necessary and related to the job, and must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities.

Pay range and benefits.

Anchor the range in your market, then adjust for the duties you wrote above.

The national benchmark: in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) May 2025 release, paralegals and legal assistants (SOC 23-2011) had a median annual wage of $62,890 ($30.24 per hour), with the 10th percentile at $44,740 and the 90th percentile at $101,500 — the percentiles mark the spread of the field, not a floor and a cap for your hire.

In the same release, paralegals and legal assistants in the Legal Services industry had a median annual wage of $61,770.

If the job you are filling is really a legal secretary role, BLS counts that as a different occupation — Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (SOC 43-6012), with a median annual wage of $55,570 — a separate series, not a legal-assistant figure.

State figures are on our legal assistant salary page.

Whatever range you post should be one you believe.

California defines "pay scale" as a good-faith estimate of the salary or hourly range the employer reasonably expects to pay on hire, with penalties running $100 to $10,000 per violation.

In the jurisdictions our research verified, posting the range is already the law: California (employers with 15 or more employees), Washington (15 or more, in effect since January 1, 2023), Illinois (15 or more), Minnesota (30 or more), Massachusetts (25 or more, effective October 29, 2025), New York State (four or more employees), New York City (since November 1, 2022), Colorado, Connecticut (effective October 1, 2026) and Virginia.

California also requires the pay scale for a position on an applicant's reasonable request regardless of employer size.

Nevada's rule works differently — the wage or salary range goes to an applicant who has completed an interview, not into the posting.

Other places have their own rules we did not read, so check with your state labor agency before you post.

Two pay decisions sit behind the range.

Overtime: DOL regulations say paralegals and legal assistants generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialized academic degree is not a standard prerequisite for the field — the exception DOL gives is a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job, and job titles do not decide exemption; duties and salary do.

Our guide to paralegal overtime rules walks the analysis.

Bonuses: ABA Model Rule 5.4(a) bars sharing legal fees with a nonlawyer, while Rule 5.4(a)(3) lets a firm include nonlawyer employees in a compensation or retirement plan based in whole or in part on profit-sharing — whether staff may take a percentage of a specific case fee is a state-specific ethics question, covered in our guide to staff bonuses under Rule 5.4.

Confirm bonus wording with your state bar's ethics counsel before you promise one in a posting.

Before you post, confirm the rules that move.

Posting laws differ by state, city and employer size, and legislatures keep amending them; classification and bonus questions vary on their own tracks.

Confirm current pay-disclosure rules with your state labor agency, and classification and bonus questions with employment counsel or your state bar's ethics counsel.

Adapting the template for a small firm.

If one hire has to span the phones, the files, the filings and the billing support, write exactly that breadth into the duties block instead of dressing it up — candidates self-select better on an honest list than on a generic one.

The named-supervisor line matters more in a small firm, not less: with fewer lawyers, each person's supervisory role is specific, and the duty attaches to the lawyer with direct supervisory authority, so name who reviews the work.

Adapting for a practice area.

Rewrite the duties bullets around the documents your matters actually produce.

A litigation support list lives in discovery materials, exhibits, e-filing and hearing binders; a family-law list handles sensitive client documents and steady status communication; a transactional list keeps entities, closings and document sets current; a personal-injury list assembles client intake paperwork, medical records and demand follow-up.

Let the requirements block follow: ask for experience with the documents your practice generates, not "legal support experience" in the abstract.

Deciding what the title means in your posting.

Because BLS counts paralegals and legal assistants as one occupation and cannot split the titles in its wage data, a "legal assistant" opening can read as a casework role or a secretarial one.

Fix it in the duties block: if the role is substantive, say which documents the assistant drafts for review; if it is secretarial support, say which calendar, phones and filing systems they will run.

Set the pay range against the duties you write, not the title.

Adapting for level.

An entry-level posting leans on program completion and the training you will provide; an experienced posting asks for years of supervised legal support and day-one ownership of the calendar and the files.

Say which one you are hiring — it shows up in the requirements block and in the range you set, and it saves you from rewriting the posting after the first round of applications.

Five wordings sink otherwise good legal assistant postings.

Each is fixable before you hit publish.

1. Duties that promise legal advice.

Phrases like "advise clients on their options" or "handle your own caseload" read as practicing law, and a lawyer may not assist unauthorized practice.

Keep every duty inside supervised work — ABA Formal Opinion 506's intake line is the model: the nonlawyer gathers facts, runs the initial conflict check and collects the fee-agreement signature, and the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to the lawyer.

The full boundary is mapped in our guide to paralegal UPL risks.

2. Preference wording that screens by who people are.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applications from, people because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — its own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage people over 40 from applying.

Write about the work, not the person: cut "young," "digital native" and "recent grad."

Keep application questions to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified — the EEOC treats questions about race, sex, national origin, age or religion as irrelevant to that decision — and treat the borderline ones as risky rather than harmless, because federal law does not clearly forbid every such question but the answers can be used as evidence of discriminatory intent unless justified by a business purpose.

Keep the process accessible too: an employer must provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs in order to apply, unless it causes significant difficulty or expense.

3. Salary-history questions.

Six state salary-history bans our research read, each with its own mechanics: California (Labor Code 432.3) bars every employer, at any size, from seeking an applicant's salary history and from relying on it in hiring or pay decisions; New York (Labor Law 194-a) bars relying on it and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, or seeking it from a current or former employer; Illinois (820 ILCS 112) bars screening applicants by it, requesting it as a condition of an interview or offer, and seeking it from a current or former employer; Massachusetts (G.L. c.149 §105A) bars seeking it from the candidate or a current or former employer; and Virginia (Code 40.1-28.7:12) and Nevada (NRS 613.133) both ban seeking it.

Ask for expectations instead — California's law expressly allows an employer to ask an applicant about their salary expectation for the position.

Other states and cities have rules we did not read, so check yours before the interview stage.

4. Conviction-history questions too early.

California's Fair Chance Act (employers with five or more employees) and New York City's Fair Chance Act (most employers) bar asking about or considering conviction or criminal history until after a conditional offer of employment; Illinois bars covered employers from asking until the applicant has been found qualified and selected for an interview or, with no interview, until after a conditional offer.

If your application form asks about criminal record, check your state and city law before you post.

5. Vague everything.

"Wear many hats," "fast-paced environment" and "other duties as assigned" with no task list pull thin applications, because experienced candidates cannot tell whether the role is supervised legal work or a catch-all front desk.

The fix is the duties block above: specific tasks, the software they run on, and the lawyer who reviews them.

After you post.

Set a review cadence before the posting goes live and hold to it — do not let applications sit unanswered while you compare notes.

If the pay range or the duties change, update the posting rather than explaining the difference in interviews.

Prepare the interview the same way for every candidate: the same questions, the same mock-file exercise, a scoring sheet — it keeps comparisons fair and keeps every question limited to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified, the EEOC's standard for pre-employment questions.

And before yours goes up, browse the live legal assistant jobs on this board to see the pay framing and duty lists you are competing against.

This page is employer information, not legal advice. Posting laws, classification rules and ethics rules change and vary by jurisdiction — confirm them with your state labor agency, employment counsel and your state bar's ethics counsel before you post.