Getting into legal

The most useful thing you can get is relevant experience. I did a short legal secretaries' course but my real break was a job covering maternity leave in the legal dept of a local Council. I was working for the Deputy Head of Law and sharing an office with the Head's PA, so we used to get telephone calls about anything and everything and that was really confidence building too, you get to feel that you can deal with things that are thrown at you.

I don't know where you are and private practice here has much less maternity leave than the public sector, but even so.... the advantage of the council is that equal ops recruitment procedures mean they have to take into account things which will help you, and the temporary job plus a wage which was better than what I had been getting but not at a legal secretarial level cut down the competition, though even so I was offered the job over two other candidates considered appointable (both of whom were subsequently employed in the dept to cover other jobs and maternity leave).

Then I had a boss who wrote pages and pages which I could only read if I never took my eyes off, forcing me to be much stricter about touch typing and that helped push my speed.

After 9 months, some agencies didn't want to know but once one booked me for my knowledge of an obscure wp package, they were able to keep me busy at £11 an hour with only one down day, compared to £7-£8.50 an hour before as a non-legal temp (this was 1998). I think it would have been even better if I'd stayed temping there for a time, as I was offered another maternity leave cover post soon after I started temping but had to chase my reference for several weeks from the council (I'd been shown a previous version so I knew it was worth chasing).

Luci