PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
"Be the person in charge! Busy sole practitioner with active plaintiff's docket seeks legal assistant with 3 years experience in litigation. Must be flexible, energetic, personable and have knowledge of WordPerfect 5.0. Compensation open and some benefits. In-house CLE provided. Reliable transportation and bilingual a must! No phone calls, please. Law Offices of John Babylawyer, 1000 Cheapo Blvd., Deadend, Texas (666) 666-6666.
I recently changed jobs after more than half a decade with the same firm. One of the first things I had to learn when I began searching for a new job was how to read between the lines of an advertisement for employment. For example, the advertisement above tells me the following:
This employer is looking for Wonder Woman. "Be the person in charge" means that you will be the only employee, and your job duties will range from carrying the garbage to drafting pleadings. You'll never get to go to trial with your employer because that would leave the office unattended. "Busy sole practitioner with active plaintiff's docket" means that when he's not out at the scene of the latest local disaster consoling the survivors, he can be found making brownie points with the local emergency room administrators. Also, since Mr. Babylawyer is only asking that his new employee have 3 years of undefined "legal experience" but does not list any on-the-job training, educational or certification requirements, he obviously doesn't know what a legal assistant is or does. He just wants someone who can juggle phones, clients and office supply salesmen.
What about "flexible, energetic and personable"...? Well, flexible says that he needs you to work every evening and all weekend long because he's too cheap to hire more than one employee. Energetic??? That means that you'll need to be in top physical condition to keep running from the phone to the copy machine to the computer, to his office with coffee, to.... And personable - I read that to mean he wants someone who will smile at him all the time, never talk back, never get angry... In other words, he wants the "Carol Brady" of legal assistants. ("Oh, Mr. Babylawyer!")
Knowledge of WordPerfect is pretty standard and probably not all that bad. However, specifying an older version such as 5.0 indicates to me that the prospective new law firm may have outdated hardware and software which is desperately seeking an upgrade! Reliable transportation signifies that you'll be running all of the firm's errands, too. Of course, those will be run on your own time and at your own expense. After all, you are too valuable to the firm to be out of the office during working hours! And as for Mr. Babylawyer's in-house CLE program - that probably means that he has an extensive collection of Stallone and Schwartzenegger movies for your viewing enjoyment (assuming you have time during your lunch hour to view them).
My favorite is "no phone calls, please." Now I realize that it is simply more professional to make a personal visit to a prospective employer rather than to telephone them. However, if Mr. Babylawyer wanted to simply review resumes prior to setting up interviews, he would probably list his mailing address or a mailing address in care of the local newspaper rather than his physical address. No, I think there is something else going on here. Mr. Babylawyer wants an opportunity to "scope out" the, ahem, qualifications of his applicants.
Of course, for this article's sake, I have greatly exaggerated some of what appears in the want ads. But as legal assistants, and most especially as litigation legal assistants, we become experts at reading between the lines. We read between the lines of our opponent's witness' testimony, our opponent's expert's testimony, and even between the lines of our own client's stories. Reading between the lines and some level of cynicism are second nature to us at times. It may make us somewhat less than trusting in the job market, but it certainly makes us better employees in the long run.
TEXAS PARALEGAL JOURNAL
Winter 1996
©1996 Legal Assistants Division, State Bar of Texas