What should you ask a legal secretary in an interview? Questions and what good answers sound like
An employer-side question bank for law firms interviewing legal secretaries — skills questions with answer guidance, behavioral questions, a practical exercise, and the questions that are risky to ask.
Screen a legal secretary with questions that make them show how they work: what they calendared and filed, how they caught problems before documents went out, and how they juggled several attorneys at once.
This question bank covers the questions to ask when hiring a legal secretary — skills, judgment, a practical exercise and the questions some jurisdictions restrict — with what strong and weak answers sound like for each.
Before the interview
Before the first candidate sits down, write down what this hire must actually do at your firm — whose calendars they keep, which filings they run, how much client contact the desk carries — and turn that into a scorecard.
Start from the legal secretary job description you posted: every question below should trace back to a duty on it.
Ask every candidate the same core set, in the same order, so the answers stay comparable; the questions to ask a legal secretary in an interview fall into three groups — skills, judgment, and a short practical exercise.
The full process, from writing the posting through supervision and onboarding, is our guide to how to hire a legal secretary.
Build any work sample on a mock file.
The FLSA, the federal wage law, defines "employ" to include "to suffer or permit to work" (29 U.S.C.
203(g)) — so a candidate doing real, usable work for the firm may be an employee owed wages for it.
An exercise on a fictional letter, memo and order keeps the sample real and the relationship on safer ground.
If you require applicants to take a test as part of the process, the EEOC's position is that the test must be necessary and related to the job, and must not exclude people of a protected group or people with disabilities.
And if an applicant with a disability needs an accommodation to apply for the job — a sign language interpreter, for example — you are required to provide it so long as it does not cause significant difficulty or expense.
One more piece of groundwork: settle the pay range you are prepared to offer before the interview.
In California, an employer must give an applicant the pay scale for the position on reasonable request, whatever the firm's size.
Where your jurisdiction lands on salary history and criminal history is covered in the risky-questions section below.
Which skills questions reveal real legal secretary experience?
Walk me through the work you handled for the attorneys you supported — from a document's first draft to the day it went out the door.
What to listen for: Duties in sequence: taking dictation or working from rough drafts, preparing correspondence and pleadings, formatting to the court's requirements, assembling the filing, and what they did after it went out.
A named practice area and document types — motions, discovery responses, engagement letters — beat a generic "I supported a team of attorneys" every time.
How did you keep track of court dates and filing deadlines?
What to listen for: A system they owned: calendar entries with reminders set ahead of the date, entries double-checked against the order or notice itself, and telling the attorney when a date looked wrong or was missing rather than letting it ride.
"I kept it all in my head" or "the attorney told me what was due each day," with no system of their own, is the weak answer.
Tell me about the last filing you submitted through the court's electronic system — start to finish.
What to listen for: Steps they can narrate without prompting: preparing the document in the required format, submitting, and what came after — confirming acceptance, saving the confirmation, and handling a rejected filing by fixing what the rejection named and resubmitting.
A candidate who cannot say what happens when a filing comes back rejected has not done this work.
Attorneys hand over messy material — handwritten notes, a memo dictated between hearings, three email threads. Tell me about the last time you turned material like that into a finished document.
What to listen for: What they asked before drafting — missing names, dates, captions — how they flagged the parts they could not read or were unsure of, and how the edits came back.
Strong answers attach the query to the specific line; weak answers are "I just typed what they gave me" with no questions asked.
What did you use day to day — word processing, spreadsheets, time entry, billing, document management? What did you actually do in each?
What to listen for: Tools named plus tasks: styles and tables in long documents, merging and converting PDFs, entering time, pulling together a client file.
Depth matters more than the list — someone who can describe building a pleading template has more usable skill than someone who can only name more programs.
Which behavioral questions test judgment, confidentiality and deadlines?
Tell me about a deadline that nearly slipped on your watch. What happened, and what changed afterwards?
What to listen for: Ownership without blame-shifting, a specific cause — a date entered wrong, a notice that arrived late — and a system fix: reminders set further out, dates confirmed against the source document, a weekly calendar check with the attorney.
"Things got busy," with no cause and no fix, is the weak answer.
Someone who is not the client — a family member, a business partner, another firm's assistant — calls asking about the case. What do you do?
What to listen for: No information out, no confirmation of details, a message taken and delivered to the attorney, and a polite deflection they can actually say out loud.
The strong answer protects the client's information without being prompted; the weak one is vague about whether they would confirm anything.
Tell me about a time you noticed something wrong — a misdated document, a name misspelled throughout, an attachment missing from a filing — just before it went out. What did you do?
What to listen for: They stopped it and raised it with the attorney before it left, even late in the day, and they describe how they raised it: with the fix ready, not just the problem.
Silently correcting substantive content without telling anyone, or sending it anyway and mentioning it later, are both weak answers.
You support more than one attorney, and late in the afternoon both hand you something due tomorrow. How do you decide what happens first?
What to listen for: Triage by real deadline and consequence, then a conversation: they ask the attorneys to prioritize rather than silently choosing, and they speak up early when the work will not all fit.
The weak answers are the two extremes — never asking, or escalating everything.
Tell me about the most sensitive material you handled day to day. How did you keep it out of the wrong conversations?
What to listen for: This is a test the right candidate passes by declining: they describe their practice in generalities — files put away, nothing discussed at home, nothing named to staff who did not need it — without handing you a client's name or a matter's details.
The candidate who names clients and case specifics in your interview may do the same with yours.
Tell me about a mistake you made that someone else caught — or that you caught yourself. What did you do?
What to listen for: Prompt disclosure, the fix verified by a second person, and a change to their process so it does not recur.
Candidates with no mistakes, or whose mistakes are always somebody else's, have not done the reflection this desk needs.
What practical exercise or test should a legal secretary complete?
Set a short exercise on a fictional file: a dictated letter or memo to prepare, plus a date to calendar from a one-page fictional order — short enough to finish in a single sitting.
What to listen for: Formatting that matches what your firm actually sends out, queries where the dictation or the order is unclear, and a calendared entry with the source noted.
What you are really watching for is the flags: a strong candidate marks what they are unsure about instead of guessing, which is exactly how they will behave on your real matters.
Ask them to walk you through their choices: why did they calendar what they did, what did they query, what did they leave alone?
What to listen for: Reasoning tied to the material you gave them, and a genuine position change when you point to something they missed.
Coachability on a correction is the trait that keeps a busy secretary's work reliable; rehearsed answers collapse here.
If the role is transcription-heavy, add a short audio file with deliberate rough patches — an unreadable name, a date said twice in different ways.
What to listen for: Clean handling of the rough patches: bracketed queries or a note listing what needs confirming, never invented content smoothed over.
Inventing a plausible name or date to cover a gap in the dictation is the failure this test exists to catch — it is the same failure that misdates real documents.
Close by asking what they would need from the attorneys they support to do the job well.
What to listen for: A calendar system they can own, templates and prior documents to work from, a named person who answers questions when the attorney is unavailable, and clarity on who sets priorities when two attorneys want something at once.
A candidate who asks these is describing how they have actually worked — or revealing that they never have.
Which questions are illegal or risky to ask?
Keep interview questions to what is essential to deciding whether the candidate can do the work — the EEOC's position is that questions about race, sex, national origin, age and religion are irrelevant to that decision, and EEOC protection reaches applicants, not only current employees.
Federal law does not clearly forbid every question touching those traits, but the answers can be used as evidence of an intent to discriminate unless the question is justified by a business purpose, so treat them as risky rather than merely awkward.
Two areas carry actual bans in the state and city statutes verified for this page — salary history and criminal history.
Firm size matters for federal coverage: Title VII, the ADA and GINA cover private employers with 15 or more employees who worked at least 20 calendar weeks in the current or prior year, and the age discrimination law (ADEA) covers those with 20 or more employees who worked at least 20 calendar weeks in the current or prior year.
The statutes below are the ones this page's research verified, not a complete list — check your state and city before you interview.
- “How much are you making now? What did your last firm pay you?” California's Labor Code 432.3 bars seeking an applicant's salary history — compensation and benefits included, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent — and bars relying on it in deciding whether to hire or what to pay, at employers of any size. New York bars relying on an applicant's wage or salary history and requesting it as a condition of being interviewed, considered, hired or promoted, or seeking it from a current or former employer (Labor Law 194-a). Illinois makes it unlawful to screen applicants by salary history and to request it as a condition of an interview or offer (820 ILCS 112). Massachusetts bars seeking it from the candidate or a current or former employer (G.L. c.149 s.105A). Connecticut bars asking about a prospective employee's wage and salary history unless the applicant volunteers it, Virginia's Code 40.1-28.7:12 bans seeking salary history, and so does Nevada's NRS 613.133. States and cities beyond the statutes verified for this page have their own rules — check yours before you interview. Ask what pay the candidate expects for this position instead, which California's law expressly allows; if a candidate volunteers prior pay unprompted, California lets you consider it, and New York lets you confirm it only after you have made an offer with compensation and the candidate cites prior pay to support a higher number.
- “Have you ever been arrested or convicted?” Each jurisdiction verified for this page restricts when you may ask, and the timing differs. California's Fair Chance Act (Gov. Code 12952) applies to employers with five or more employees and bars asking about or considering conviction history until after a conditional offer. New York City's Fair Chance Act — part of the NYC Human Rights Law since October 27, 2015 — makes it unlawful for most employers to inquire about or consider an applicant's criminal history before a conditional offer. Illinois's Job Opportunities for Qualified Applicants Act (820 ILCS 75/15) holds the question, for covered employers, until the applicant has been determined qualified and notified that they have been selected for an interview or, when there is no interview, until after a conditional offer. Other states and cities have fair-chance rules this research did not cover. In California, denying a job over conviction history requires an individualized assessment, written notice and at least five business days for the applicant to respond before a final decision. And weigh any exclusion carefully: under FTC/EEOC guidance, criminal-record screens that significantly disadvantage a protected group without predicting job performance can be unlawful disparate impact.
- “How is your health? Any gaps in your history for health reasons?” Employers should not ask medical questions before a conditional job offer. FTC/EEOC guidance treats certain medical and genetic information as the exception to its general rule that asking about an applicant's background is not illegal — and a candidate's treatment history, disability or family health situation is not for a pre-offer interview.
- Ordering a background report without the required steps. If you buy a report from a background-check company for a finalist, the FCRA path runs: a stand-alone written disclosure (not inside the employment application), the candidate's written permission, and — before any adverse decision — a copy of the report plus “A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.”
- “Where are you from originally? How old are you? Who watches your kids while you are at work? What church do you attend? Do you own your home?” The EEOC publishes guidance on pre-employment inquiries about race, height and weight, financial information, unemployed status, religious affiliation, citizenship, and marital status or number of children, and its position is that race, sex, national origin, age and religion are irrelevant to whether a person is qualified — so “are you between jobs right now?” sits on that list too. If the concern behind the question is real for this desk, ask about the work instead: availability for the hours the role needs, turnaround under deadline, comfort with the software your firm runs.
After the interview
Score while it is fresh.
Rate each candidate against the same scorecard right after the interview, before the next one starts.
Across every question above, the strong-versus-weak pattern holds: strong answers are specific and reconstructable — the deadline and the system that caught it, the filing and the rejection it survived, the query attached to the exact line.
Weak answers stay generic: duties described without a single document, no system behind the calendar, mistakes that are always somebody else's.
A candidate who declines to name clients and matters in your interview is passing a test, not failing one.
Deadline tracking — strong: an owned calendar with reminders, entries checked against the source order or notice, discrepancies raised with the attorney; weak: memory, or waiting each morning to be told what is due.
E-filing — strong: narrates a submission end to end, including a rejected filing and how it was fixed and resubmitted; weak: cannot say what happens after the submit button.
Confidentiality — strong: describes practice in generalities, takes a message instead of confirming details to a non-client; weak: drops client names or case specifics into the interview unprompted.
Judgment under competing priorities — strong: asks the attorneys to prioritize and flags capacity early; weak: silently chooses, or silently drops one attorney's work.
Mistakes — strong: disclosed promptly, fixed, verified by a second person, process changed; weak: no mistakes, or mistakes that are always someone else's.
Expect questions from the candidate — they carry signal too.
A strong legal secretary candidate asks how many attorneys they would support, who owns the calendar when the desk and the attorney disagree, what happens when the attorney is unreachable and a filing will not go through, and what the hours look like in trial weeks.
They may ask about pay — answer concretely, and have the position's pay scale ready: in California, an employer must give an applicant the pay scale on reasonable request, whatever the firm's size.
Rate-and-schedule questions with nothing about the work, or no questions at all, are the weaker signals.
Before you offer, close the loop you opened in the interview: check what you heard against references, confirm the skills on your scorecard against the sample they completed, and put the duties and pay in writing.
The screening, verification and supervision steps that follow are in how to hire a legal secretary.
This page is employer information, not legal advice. Interview and screening rules — salary history, criminal history, medical inquiries, background reports — change and vary by jurisdiction. Confirm yours with the EEOC, your state labor agency and employment counsel before you interview.
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