The Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs recently introduced a new Family Law unit to its Legal Secretaries Diploma course. This month we are considering possible changes to the law relating to marital property and prenuptial agreements. 

A prenuptial agreement is the term commonly used to describe a range of different agreements. These agreements are designed to set forth how property and finances will be dealt with if a married couple separate. A prenuptial agreement is one entered into before a marriage. A postnuptial or separation agreement is one entered into after marriage. 

An article was last published in this Journal about the law of intestacy in 2009. There had been a Law Commission paper published on the 29th October 2009 with a number of proposals that might be formed into a new bill. Well, nearly five years later that proposed bill has been made into an Act of Parliament as the Inheritance and Trustees’ Powers Act 2014, receiving royal assent on the 14th May. The commencement date for the Act is the 1st October. So what has changed?

Key changes include simplifying how assets are shared when someone dies intestate and recognising more modern family structures (i.e. the fact that many in today’s society choose to cohabit rather than marry). 

The Intestacy Rule Changes 

Finding and securing a job can be a protracted, often frustrating activity, but there are ways to streamline your search for the perfect law role, cutting out time and stress as you go. A massive trend in recent years has been the growth of highly targeted, specialist job boards, covering just about every career sector under the sun – from law to automotive to aviation to sales to travel sector jobs, to name just a few.

Legal Secretaries have to deal with a wide range of correspondence throughout the day. They not only interact with peers and colleagues on a daily basis, but also must effectively communicate with lawyers and other legal professionals regularly. This includes not only face-to-face communication, but also phone calls, email, written correspondence, and in some cases teleconferencing or other live video. Because of this, solid interpersonal and communication skills are a necessity when working in the legal field.

People Skills

Any legal case can involve a lot of paperwork, especially in large cases or cases in which one party is attempting to make a large number of claims against the other. Both parties may present evidence or make statements to help tell their side of the story, and this evidence may be presented in the form of a statement of case. While some countries, such as the United States, use a single form for these statements and use them merely to provide background information about the case being heard, English law gives a much more significant role to these statements in civil legal proceedings.

ILSPA’s Legal Secretaries Diploma course covers Civil Litigation, and Students learn exactly what statements of case consist of. One of our achievement test questions covers this area of practice, so we would like to support our Students’ studies with this article.

The new website just launched by The Institute of Legal Secretaries and PAs is packed full of valuable information for both trainee and experienced Legal Secretaries and PAs.  One of the features on ILSPA’s website is an exclusive online Membership area, which includes a wealth of resources to help people in their studies and careers.  A bonus for Students is that ILSPA’s widely recognised Legal Secretaries Diploma course is now online.

Office* is taking place on 7-8 October and is now CPD-accredited – giving even more value to our cost-effective training seminars for you and your company.

You will be able to claim a CPD Certificate of Attendance for any paid-for training seminars that you go to across the two days – these can be used in your formal CPD record for a professional body, institution or employer, and each hour of contact learning time will equate to one point.

If you’d have told me 20 years ago that I would now be working as a Legal Secretary, I would have laughed.

I always wanted to be a Medical Secretary, as I had always been interested in that sort of environment. So after college, my dream came true and I started to work at my local hospital as a relief Medical Secretary. I loved my job and looked forward to every working day.

When I met my future husband, I left the hospital and moved 250 miles south. I was offered a post as a Legal Secretary in the personal injury department of a local Solicitor’s office, and suffice to say, I wasn’t overly enthusiastic.

How wrong I was. My knowledge of medical terminology stood me in good stead; however, I must have annoyed my colleagues with endless questions regarding legal jargon and the whys and wherefores of legal practice! 

In a previous article I mentioned that Google Docs has a marketplace for third-party add-ons. These five add-ons will improve your workflow dramatically. To install any of these add-ons, you simply click “Add-ons” from within your Docs editor. Find the add-on and click the blue box with a plus sign in it.

1.    EasyBib Citation and Bibliography Generator

EasyBib makes bibliographies and citations even easier than using Docs’ handy referencing side bar. You can search the web and academic journals and even drill down to content on a specific website. EasyBib lets you format your citations using three popular standards.

http://easybib.com

2.    Vertex Template Gallery

Family law is in need of an update, according to the interim report of a working group set up by Sir James Munby, head of the Family Division. This isn’t necessarily surprising and may well be overdue, as the Family Court is falling behind the Crown Court in regard to how it treats vulnerable witnesses. Given that many of the witnesses who speak in the Family Court are children and others who might be considered ‘vulnerable’, there is an obvious need for this to be addressed.