How do you hire a legal secretary? A hiring guide for law firms

Write the duty list before you write the ad.

BLS's occupation profile for Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (SOC 43-6012) describes the work as preparing summonses, complaints, motions, subpoenas and other documents under the supervision of attorneys or paralegals, and helping with research tasks such as verifying quotes and citations in briefs.

That is the statistical core of the title; your firm's version adds whatever else the seat owns — calendars, e-filing deadlines, client contact, document production.

Scope the title deliberately, because the same words describe different jobs.

NALA treats "legal assistant" and "paralegal" as synonymous terms, saying state supreme court rules, statutes, ethics opinions and bar guidelines define them that way, while employer usage of the titles varies.

Read resumes by duty list, not by title — a "legal assistant" heading can sit over secretarial work or over paralegal-level delegated work, and only the duties tell you which.

Level is a scoping decision too.

A seat that owns one practice group's calendars, filings and correspondence is a different job from a floating desk that covers overflow document production for the whole firm — same title, different duty lists.

Decide which one you are hiring before you post, and write the posting from that list.

The context worth knowing before you commit the seat: BLS projects employment of legal secretaries and administrative assistants to fall from 157,600 in 2025 to 149,300 in 2035 — a 5% decline of 8,300 jobs — and cites AI and digital tools that let staff prepare their own documents among the reasons.

The takeaway for a hiring firm is not to skip the hire; it is to define exactly which work you are keeping in-house and hire to that list.

For the candidate-side view of the title — the duties people bring to it and how they train for it — our guide to what a legal secretary does covers the career picture.

Where this hire fits next to paralegals, intake staff and the rest of your recruiting is covered in our guide to hiring for your law firm.

One credential family to know for this title is NALS's.

NALS, the association for legal professionals, offers three certifications — the ALP (Accredited Legal Professional), the CLP (Certified Legal Professional) and the PP (Professional Paralegal) — and NALS membership is not required to sit for any of the exams.

The ALP is a computerized multiple-choice exam, valid for five years and renewable with at least 50 hours of CLE credits and activities, and NALS describes it as a possible first step toward the CLP or PP.

For a hiring firm, a current credential is a signal that a candidate invests in the field — check any NALS credential a candidate lists with NALS, and confirm current exam requirements with NALS before you write certification into a posting as a requirement.

A credential does not change what the person may legally do.

Comment [2] to ABA Model Rule 5.5 says the definition of the practice of law varies by jurisdiction; its delegation clause — the rule does not stop a lawyer from delegating functions to paraprofessionals so long as the lawyer supervises the delegated work and keeps responsibility for it — speaks to paraprofessionals, not secretaries by name.

For a secretary, the rule that names the role is Rule 5.3, below.

Your state adopts its own version of each rule, so the boundary is state-specific even where the wording looks familiar.

The supervision expectations live in ABA Model Rule 5.3.

Its Comment [2] names secretaries among the assistants lawyers employ — alongside investigators, law student interns and paraprofessionals, whether employees or independent contractors — and says lawyers must instruct them on the ethics rules, especially confidentiality.

That instruction duty is the hiring-relevant half of the rule: it starts when the person starts.

Both rules are the ABA's model texts; each state adopts its own version.

Confirm how your state's adopted rules treat secretaries, credentials and delegated work with your state bar's ethics counsel before either goes into a posting or a duty list.

The experienced pool is people already in the occupation: BLS's projections put legal secretaries and administrative assistants at 157,600 jobs in 2025, headed to 149,300 by 2035 — so a posting has to reach people who already hold one of those seats or trained for the work.

Named channels worth checking: the Association of Legal Administrators runs a job board (alanet.org/career-center) that accepts ads for support staff such as legal secretaries, legal assistants, paralegals and law clerks, and if your state or local bar association runs a job board, that is worth a look too.

Referrals are a channel with a constraint attached.

The EEOC's guidance on word-of-mouth recruiting: relying only on referrals from a workforce that is mostly one group may violate federal anti-discrimination law if almost all of your new hires end up from that group.

Make referrals one channel among several, not the whole pipeline.

Watch the ad's wording while you are at it.

The EEOC says it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for — or discourages applicants 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 applicants over 40.

Describe the duties and the required skills, and leave the rest out.

Your own posting is the last channel: put the role in front of legal staff looking for law-firm work, with the duty list from the first section and the pay range from the next.

The benchmark series is BLS's OEWS for Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (SOC 43-6012) — one series covering the combined title, so it cannot price your exact duty list within it.

Nationally in May 2025, the median annual wage was $55,570 ($26.72 an hour), with the 10th percentile at $36,500 and the 90th at $91,730.

The middle half of the series earns between $44,450 (25th percentile) and $71,970 (75th percentile).

Budget against the duty list you scoped in the first section: a seat that owns litigation calendars and e-filing is not the same job as a document-production desk, so price the one you are actually hiring.

Geography moves the number, and BLS publishes state tables for the same series: the full state-by-state table for SOC 43-6012 is on the legal secretary salary page.

Two checks belong in the budget.

In California, Labor Code 432.3 entitles an applicant to the position's pay scale on reasonable request — regardless of employer size — and requires the pay scale in the job posting once an employer has 15 or more employees.

And how a staff hire classifies for overtime is a separate, fact-specific analysis under federal and state wage law, so confirm classification with employment counsel before treating the role as salaried-exempt.

Test the work itself.

The skills this seat runs on — document production in your word processor, formatting filings to a court's conventions, calendar and deadline management, proofreading — each convert into a short exercise: a document to format to your template, a proofreading passage with planted errors, a calendar scenario with a filing that moves, a typing or transcription sample under time.

If you require a test, the EEOC's guidance applies: the test must be necessary for and related to the job, and must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities.

And if an applicant needs an accommodation to apply for the job — a sign language interpreter, for example — the EEOC says you must provide one unless it causes significant difficulty or expense.

Keep the interview questions on the work.

The EEOC's guidance on pre-employment questions: limit them to what is essential to deciding whether the person is qualified, and treat questions touching race, sex, national origin, religion or age as risky rather than merely awkward — federal law does not clearly forbid every such question, but the answers can be used as evidence of intent to discriminate unless the question is justified by a business purpose.

Salary history has state rules of its own.

California's Labor Code 432.3 bars seeking an applicant's salary history — orally or in writing, personally or through an agent — and bars relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay, though the same statute lets you ask about salary expectations and consider history the candidate volunteers.

New York's Labor Law 194-a bars relying on salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, and bars seeking it from a current or former employer.

States differ, so check the rule where your firm hires before the interview loop starts.

Two law-firm-specific screens round it out.

Ask how the candidate handled client information in their last role — Comment [2] to ABA Model Rule 5.3 says lawyers must instruct assistants on the ethics rules, confidentiality especially, so a hire who has already thought about it is easier to instruct.

And if the candidate comes from a firm that sits opposite you on live matters, ask which client matters they touched: under Comment [4] to ABA Model Rule 1.10, a nonlawyer's conflict — the comment names paralegals and legal secretaries — is not imputed to the firm, but such persons ordinarily must be screened from any personal participation in the matter.

Treat the list below as follow-up prompts rather than automatic disqualifiers — the pattern worth watching is any answer that blurs who did the work or where client information lives.

• Every story is "we," none is "I." "We kept the calendars straight" is not an answer to "what did you keep straight" — press for their piece of it and how it was checked.
• No confidentiality practice to describe. The instruction duty you take on under Rule 5.3 lands easier on someone who can already describe what stayed inside the file system, what could be emailed, and what they did the last time something went out wrong.
• Describes giving legal advice. Comment [2] to Model Rule 5.5 says the definition of the practice of law varies by jurisdiction, and Comment [2] to Rule 5.3 names secretaries among the assistants who act for the lawyer and whom lawyers must instruct on the ethics rules. A candidate who routinely "handled clients' questions" with no lawyer in the story is describing a boundary you would inherit.
• Title inflation without a matching duty list. Titles vary by employer — this page's premise — so a "legal assistant" heading over front-desk duties is a scoping gap, not an honesty problem; the gap tells you which version of the role the candidate is interviewable for.
• Systems vagueness. Ask which document, docketing, billing or e-filing tools they used and what they did in each; a real answer names the tool and the task.

Onboarding activates ABA Model Rule 5.3's two halves.

Under 5.3(a), partners and lawyers with comparable managerial authority must make reasonable efforts to ensure the firm has measures giving reasonable assurance that nonlawyers' conduct is compatible with the lawyer's professional obligations; under 5.3(b), whoever directly supervises the new hire owes the same reasonable efforts.

Comment [2] is concrete about what that means for a secretary: instruction on the ethics rules, confidentiality especially, delivered with the fact in mind that nonlawyers lack legal training and are not subject to professional discipline.

Set the ramp realistically.

BLS says legal secretaries may need several months to learn industry-specific terminology, against the few weeks of on-the-job training typical for general secretaries — so calendar a real training period, name the supervising lawyer before day one, and put the confidentiality instruction in writing.

The full duty set — firm-wide measures, outside vendors, remote staff, and when a lawyer becomes responsible for a staff member's conduct — is covered in our guide to supervising non-lawyer staff under Rule 5.3.

Keeping the hire is the other half.

BLS projects the occupation will shed 8,300 jobs by 2035, so a resignation sends you back into a smaller experienced pool — which makes the cheap levers matter: a duty list that matches the job you actually gave them, a pay review against the benchmarks above, and supervision that treats their systems knowledge as the asset it is.

Employer information, not legal advice. Wage figures are BLS OEWS May 2025; the ethics rules described are the ABA's model texts, and the version your state has adopted controls. Confirm credential, delegated-work, pay-disclosure and classification questions with your state bar's ethics counsel and employment counsel.