Week 1 Post 2

Office Environment

What are your work hours; how are you supervised?
My work hours are Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. - 5.p.m. with one hour of lunch from 12 p.m. - 1 p.m.. During the lunch hour the office is closed and we all go out to eat or order in food. I am supervised by the other other legal assistant in the law firm. When the lawyer is in the office he checks up on me to make sure I understand what I am doing and if I have any questions.

Describe our work area.
I was given the reception desk at the entrance of the office. I have my own printers, scanner, fax, sticky notes, pens, pencils, paper clips, automatic stapler, hole punch, cutting board, computer with keyboard and wireless mouse. Figure 1 & 2 is my work area.

Describe your daily routine.
I don't have necessarily a daily routine other then arriving at the office always 5 minutes before 9 and I check the calendar to see what appointments Mr. Teixeira has that day and I check the brown drawer under the printer/fax machine to see what files are coming up to close. They are arranged based on closing date, which makes it easy to find which files need to be worked on and finished up. Once the legal assistant has arrived and has settled in, she tells me what we will be doing that day. This first week I did a lot of opening/ closing files, sending out faxes to firms to receive discharges on charges and answering the telephone. I did open over 10 new client files, so I am excited for these next two weeks because I will be able to work on those from beginning to finish, and help the legal assistant finish up the files that are ready for closing.

How is work initiated? Is it dictated, written out in longhand, sent to you by email or do you write your own correspondence, emails, etc.?

The legal assistant dictates to me what I have to do, and so far this week it's been straightforward easy work. We did one thing at a time too. There were over 30 files that needed to be closed and I closed them all, labelled them and placed them in the blue boxes as see in Figure 1.

Have you done anything this week you particularly enjoyed or did not enjoy?
I enjoyed closing files because I found it very straight forward. It consisted of making sure that all the necessary corresponding documents were in the file whether it was a sale, purchase or refinance. I had to make sure all paper clips were removed and everything was stapled. After that I assigned a file closing number [ex.17-41-003] (year)-(box number)-(#)]. The numbers consisted usually from 001-015 depending on how many files are able to fit in a box. It was easy and straight forward! I loved it because after finishing over two boxes the office seemed a little less cluttered and I felt I really was able to do something that helped the legal assistant have less on her plate.

School-related Reflection

Personally I would not have preferred an exam over the tests/quizzes/portfolios. Creating the portfolios has created great precedents to bring along to work with me. The quizzes were great because it kept all the material fresh in my mind. The weekly quizzes in Corporate law were also very helpful instead of a mid-term because that course was very theory based. It was also helpful once the quizzes were done that they showed you the correct answers in order to learn from the mistakes.

I found the answer keys on the bulletin board also very helpful. It is easy to just get instructions but it's hard sometimes to put all the information your given all together. Seeing precedents of other students work helped me see where I should start, or where I went wrong or what I needed to change.


                   FIGURE 1                                                FIGURE 2