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Legal secretaries

Official title Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (SOC 43-6012)

Also called Legal administrative assistant, Legal office assistant, Law office secretary, Litigation secretary, Corporate legal secretary

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 156,280 US legal secretaries, with median pay of $55,570 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 159,940, in May 2022, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 35,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for legal secretaries: Cloud practice management + electronic court filing, 2010 to 2022. Electronic court filing eliminated a significant category of physical logistics tasks.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to decline 5.2% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 46% of work tasks in office and administrative support occupations, this job's group, are exposed to automation by AI. Not a forecast of job losses. Goldman Sachs, 2023
  • 76.1% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Legal secretaries: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-6012

Chicago

Future History. "Legal secretaries: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-6012.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_43_6012, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Legal secretaries: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/43-6012}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

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1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Law Clerk / Law Office Copyist (copying and correspondence era)
Known then as Legal Stenographer / Law Stenographer (shorthand and typewriter era)
Known then as Legal Secretary (standardized law firm role, pre-word-processing era)
Known then as Legal Secretary (word processing and computerized docketing era)
Known then as Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (BLS SOC 43-6012)
Known today as Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (BLS SOC 43-6012)
Projected to still be called Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (BLS SOC 43-6012)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
156K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$55,570
Est.

≈ $54,145 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1878

The Remington No. 2 typewriter, the first commercially successful typewriter with both upper and lowercase letters, is released. Law offices are among its earliest adopters: the typewriter produces legible, consistent text that handwriting cannot match for formal legal documents. Within a decade, the "typewriter girl" (as contemporary press called female typist-operators) is a fixture in American law offices. The typewriter also feminizes clerical legal labor: employers discover they can hire women at roughly half male wages for what is now reclassified as mechanical rather than professional work.

Beat · 1888

John Robert Gregg publishes his shorthand system ("Light-Line Phonography") in Liverpool. Gregg shorthand, with its cursive, ellipse-based strokes designed to flow naturally from ordinary handwriting, becomes the dominant shorthand system in American business and legal offices through the mid-20th century, eventually displacing the older Pitman system. Legal secretaries who mastered Gregg shorthand and typing speeds above 80 words per minute became the most valued clerical workers in law firms of the 1900s-1950s.

Beat · 1949

The National Association of Legal Secretaries (NALS) is founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by a group of legal secretaries who sought professional recognition and standardized training for the occupation. NALS establishes an education and certification program that eventually yields the Accredited Legal Professional (ALP) and Professional Legal Secretary (PLS) credentials. The founding reflects the mid-century peak of the occupation's self-perception as a distinct profession with specialized knowledge: not just a typist who happened to work in a law office, but a trained specialist in court procedures, legal forms, and attorney workflow.

Beat · 1976

Wang Laboratories introduces its dedicated word processing workstation, which rapidly displaces the IBM Selectric typewriter in large law firm typing pools. WordPerfect (1979) follows and becomes the dominant legal word processor through the 1980s and early 1990s. The transition from typewriter to word processor is the largest single transformation in legal secretary tool use between the typewriter's introduction and email. A document stored on disk can be revised without re-typing; pleadings that previously required complete re-typing for every revision cycle can now be corrected page by page. Attorneys request more revisions, document length increases, but net secretarial employment holds steady through the 1980s as litigation volume expands.

Beat · 1992

The American Bar Association reports approximately 805,000 practicing lawyers in the United States in 1992, the near-peak year for the 20th-century legal profession expansion. Large law firms of the early 1990s maintained secretary-to-attorney ratios approaching 1:1; the Am Law 100 firms each employed hundreds of legal secretaries, many earning $35,000-$50,000 in major markets. This is the high-water mark of the occupation's employment level and professional status. Within a decade, email and computerized docketing will begin the structural decline.

Beat · 2001

The federal court CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Files) system begins mandatory electronic filing in the first federal districts. Over the following decade, electronic filing becomes mandatory across nearly all federal courts, and most state courts follow. The requirement that parties file via web portal rather than physically at the courthouse clerk's window eliminates a category of legal secretary work that had previously required daily courthouse logistics: preparing physical copies, organizing filing fees, obtaining file-stamped return copies, and coordinating courier services. The legal secretary's geographic relationship to the courthouse changes from physical to digital.

Beat · 2023

Harvey AI secures a $21 million Series A from Sequoia Capital and OpenAI in April 2023, citing deployments at PwC, A&O Shearman, and other major legal organizations. By March 2026, Harvey is valued at $11 billion and serves 1,500+ legal organizations in 60+ countries. Harvey's trajectory is the clearest single data point on where legal AI investment is flowing: not into replacing lawyers, but into accelerating the document-intensive workflows that legal secretaries and paralegals have traditionally managed. The existential question for the legal secretary role in the mid-2020s is whether law firms use AI-driven productivity gains to reduce support staff headcount or to expand the work each attorney can handle.

Beat · 2025

Clio releases its Intelligent Legal Work Platform in October 2025, with Clio Manage AI as the centerpiece: the system can accept an uploaded court order or scheduling notice and automatically extract all deadlines, create calendar events across the practice management system, and flag conflicts. This is the most direct automation of the legal secretary's most time-sensitive and highest-stakes responsibility, calendar management for court deadlines, since electronic docketing replaced tickler files in the 1990s. Robert Half's 2026 Legal Salary Guide, published the same month, notes that legal firms are paying premiums for support staff fluent in Clio and iManage, suggesting that the AI transition is creating a two-tier legal secretary workforce: those who manage the AI tool stack and those who are displaced by it.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace legal secretaries? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
-5.2%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 43-6012 (Legal secretaries and administrative assistants): 157.6 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 149.3 thousand in 2035, a change of -8.3 thousand (-5.2%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.2% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
76.1%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 43-6012.00 Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants. Shown: human-rated β = 0.761, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.522 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 1; GPT-4-rated β 0.696. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Goldman Sachs (Briggs & Kodnani, 2023), "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth"
2023 study · Share of work tasks exposed to automation by AI, all office and administrative support occupations (US)
46%
of tasks
What this measures

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research scored the task content of each US occupation for exposure to automation by generative AI and weighted by OEWS employment. Exhibit 5 (US panel) reports 46% for office and administrative support occupations, the occupational group this role belongs to; the report publishes no figure for individual occupations. It measures how much of the group's work AI could automate, not how many jobs disappear, and it is a 2023 estimate, not a forecast for a later year.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for legal secretaries

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is taking this onComplete standardized legal and court forms by pulling client and matter data from the case management system: accident reports, venue applications, client intake questionnaires, and fee-waiver requests

Complete standardized legal and court forms by pulling client and matter data from the case management system: accident reports, venue applications, client intake questionnaires, and fee-waiver requests. Verify accuracy before submission.[1],[8]

Where your edge is

As form completion becomes fully automated, shift time toward tasks that require human verification and cross-checking: confirming that data auto-populated into forms matches the underlying source documents, and flagging edge cases that break template assumptions.

AI is sitting alongside you hereProduce court-ready legal documents (summonses, subpoenas, complaints, motions, and pretrial agreements) using AI document-assembly tools: populate case-specific variables, proof AI-generated drafts for accuracy, and file via the court's electronic filing system.

Produce court-ready legal documents (summonses, subpoenas, complaints, motions, and pretrial agreements) using AI document-assembly tools: populate case-specific variables, proof AI-generated drafts for accuracy, and file via the court's electronic filing system.[8],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Master the document template and variable system in Clio Draft so the firm's precedents drive AI output rather than generic defaults. Proofing AI-assembled documents requires knowing where the system most often makes errors: party name mismatches, wrong jurisdiction dates, and stale boilerplate.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDraft routine legal correspondence (transmittal letters, client status updates, demand letters, and settlement offers) using AI writing tools

Draft routine legal correspondence (transmittal letters, client status updates, demand letters, and settlement offers) using AI writing tools; review for tone, confidentiality, and legal accuracy before attorney sign-off.[9],[1]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Focus on correspondence where tone, empathy, and situational judgment matter most: bad-news letters, settlement communications, and client status updates in emotionally charged cases. AI generates technically accurate text; you provide the human judgment about how it lands.

Where legal secretaries go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Compliance Officers

Legal secretaries who develop fluency with a specific regulatory domain (employment law, HIPAA, or data privacy) are well-positioned for compliance assistant and junior compliance officer roles. The skills that transfer directly include document management, deadline tracking, confidentiality discipline, and working with legal professionals. Compliance teams in healthcare, financial services, and tech actively recruit candidates with law-firm administrative backgrounds because they understand documentation standards, audit trails, and regulatory correspondence formats.

What you'd add
  • · Regulatory framework depth in one domain (HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, or CCPA)
  • · Risk assessment basics: how to identify, document, and escalate compliance gaps
  • · CRCM (Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager) or CIPP certification for credentialing
  • · AI compliance tooling (e.g., OneTrust, Relativity Compliance) for workflow automation
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of legal secretaries changed since 1850?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Quill and steel-nib pen, handwritten copying (pre-typewriter era)

    Law office clerical work in the mid-19th century was entirely manual: every letter, pleading, deed, and contract was produced in longhand by copying clerks who might produce thousands of words of legible script per day. The Dickensian "scrivener" was not a literary invention; Bartleby's occupation was a real and common one in American legal and commercial offices. Errors required the physical re-copying of entire documents, making accuracy and patience the primary job requirements. Court documents required multiple verbatim copies; large transactions might require a small team of copyists working for days on a single deed.

  • Typewriter + Pitman/Gregg shorthand (Remington No. 2 era, from 1878)

    The Remington No. 2 typewriter (1878) was the first commercially successful typewriter with lowercase letters; by 1890 Remington had sold about a hundred thousand machines and legal offices were primary customers. The typewriter transformed the legal clerk into a "typewriter operator" or "stenographer": someone who could take attorney dictation in shorthand (Pitman shorthand, invented 1837; Gregg shorthand, invented 1888) and transcribe it onto the machine at speed. This combination of dictation and typing defined the legal secretary role for the next sixty years. The typewriter also changed who did the work: while 19th-century law clerks were predominantly male (and often aspiring lawyers), the typewriter era feminized clerical labor, as employers preferentially hired women at lower wages for what was redefined as mechanical rather than professional work.

    Effect on the work

    A skilled stenographer-typist could produce many words per minute of clean typed output, dramatically exceeding what handwriting allowed.

  • Dictation machines + ditto/mimeograph duplicators (Dictaphone, Edison Voice Machine)

    The Dictaphone (Edison Business Phonograph, commercialized by Columbia Graphophone Company from 1907 as the Dictaphone) reached mass law office adoption in the 1930s as the cost of wire and later Dictabelt technology dropped. The dictation machine decoupled attorney speech from the secretary's physical presence: an attorney could dictate letters in the evening for a secretary to transcribe the next morning. Mimeograph and ditto machines (Gestetner stencil duplicator, 1881; A.B. Dick mimeograph widely adopted from the 1890s through mid-century) allowed multiple copies of legal documents to be produced without re-typing each one, reducing the re-copying burden on clerical staff. These technologies made the legal secretary more productive per hour but did not reduce demand for the role.

  • Magnetic card typewriter + photocopier (IBM MT/ST 1964, Xerox 914 1959)

    The Xerox 914 plain-paper photocopier, introduced in 1959, was the first technology to give law offices the ability to reproduce documents quickly without a stencil process. By the mid-1960s the photocopier had transformed legal practice: cases were built from copies of originals, files multiplied, and discovery became document-intensive. For the legal secretary, the photocopier added a new workload (copying and organizing production sets) while making some previous tasks (carbon paper collation) obsolete. The IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST, 1964) and its successor the Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter (MC/ST, 1969) introduced magnetic-storage revision capability: a document stored on magnetic card could be recalled and corrected without full re-typing, the first direct precursor to word processing. Legal form letters and standard pleadings benefited immediately from this technology.

  • Dedicated word processors + early PC (Wang WPS 1976, WordPerfect 1979, Windows 3.0 1990)

    Wang Laboratories' word processor (1976) and the subsequent proliferation of WordPerfect (dominant in US law firms through the 1980s and early 1990s) transformed legal secretarial work more radically than any technology since the typewriter. A document stored on disk could be revised, formatted, and reprinted without the previous generation's need to retype corrected pages. Legal brief preparation, which previously required a full re-type for every revision cycle, could now be revised in place. The result was a paradox: word processing reduced re-typing labor but expanded document length and revision cycles, because attorneys could now request changes they would have accepted as impractical under typewriter economics. Net employment did not decline through this era; if anything, the increased document volume of the litigation explosion of the 1980s sustained demand for legal secretaries.

    Effect on the work

    Wang and PC word processing eliminated the "typing pool" model prevalent at large law firms through the 1970s: centralized pools of typists handling overflow from multiple attorneys became unnecessary as each attorney could work directly with an assigned secretary on-screen. The typing pool secretarial positions were absorbed into attorney-assigned roles, changing the structure of the workforce without reducing its total size.

  • Email + case management software (Outlook, Time Matters, PCLaw, Abacus Law)

    Email (Outlook becoming dominant in law firms by 1997-2000) was the first technology that directly substituted for legal secretary labor rather than augmenting it. Before email, external legal correspondence required a secretary to type, proofread, print, envelope, and mail every letter. Email allowed attorneys to communicate directly with clients, opposing counsel, and courts without secretarial intermediation. Simultaneously, purpose-built legal case management platforms (Time Matters, PCLaw, Abacus Law, Worldox) brought electronic docketing: court deadlines, hearing dates, and statute-of-limitations calculations could be entered and automatically calculated rather than maintained on manual tickler files. These tools reduced the most repetitive portions of the legal secretary role, beginning the employment decline that has continued since 2000.

    Effect on the work

    The combination of email and electronic docketing is the primary structural driver of the legal secretary employment decline between the mid-1990s and 2000 and steadily lower thereafter.

  • Cloud practice management + electronic court filing (Clio, MyCase, CM/ECF)

    PACER and CM/ECF (Case Management/Electronic Case Files), the federal court electronic filing system, launched in stages from 2001 and was fully mandatory for most federal filings by 2006. State courts followed through the 2010s. Electronic filing eliminated a category of legal secretary work that had previously required physical courthouse trips or courier coordination: filing court documents now required logging into a web portal rather than driving to the clerk's office. Cloud-based practice management (Clio, founded 2008; MyCase, founded 2010) moved client intake, matter management, and billing online, enabling attorneys at small firms to handle their own administrative workflows without dedicated secretarial support. Legal secretaries at small firms faced the sharpest employment pressure from this transition.

    Effect on the work

    Electronic court filing eliminated a significant category of physical logistics tasks. By the 2010s, "running to the courthouse" had vanished as a legal secretary job description item at all but the smallest or most rural practices. Some secretarial positions in small-firm settings were eliminated entirely as cloud tools made attorney self-service viable.

  • AI-powered legal practice management: Clio Manage AI, Harvey, Spellbook, iManage Ask (from 2022-2025)

    The 2022-2025 wave of AI tools in legal practice represents the most acute phase of the legal secretary's structural challenge. Clio Manage AI (launched October 2025 as part of the Intelligent Legal Work Platform) auto-extracts court deadlines from uploaded documents, creates calendar events, generates draft invoices, and suggests unlogged time entries. Harvey (general availability 2023, valued at $11 billion by March 2026) drafts correspondence and summarizes documents. Spellbook (Word add-in) assembles contracts from precedent clause libraries. iManage Ask iManage (GA 2024) enables natural-language search across the firm's entire document management system. These tools collectively automate or augment the five highest-volume legal secretary tasks: document production, calendar management, billing, correspondence drafting, and document retrieval. The remaining human floor is the work AI cannot yet handle: reading the emotional register of a distressed client call, exercising judgment about confidentiality in ambiguous situations, and coordinating the competing schedules and competing interests of multiple attorneys in a busy practice.

    Effect on the work

    WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects 19 million administrative secretary roles displaced globally by 2027, with legal secretaries among the most exposed subcategories.

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Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants employment and pay by year

On record since1850
Latest US employment156,280 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$55,570 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook-5.2% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • Canada (NOC 13111)

    Employment, 2020
    43,425, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021: number of persons with employment income in NOC 13111 Legal administrative assistants, Canada, reference year 2020. A recipients basis (anyone with employment income during the year), slightly broader than a point-in-time employed count. Statistics Canada Open Licence.
    Median pay, 2020
    C$55,200, Statistics Canada Census 2021 Official statistic Report an errorStatistics Canada Census of Population 2021 (Table 98-10-0586): median employment income for NOC 13111 Legal administrative assistants, Canada, reference year 2020, full-year full-time workers (the basis comparable to the US OEWS full-time median). Statistics Canada Open Licence.
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
190035,000n/aDecennial Census Researched contextReport
1950155,000n/aEst., Estimate derived from ABA… Researched contextReport
1956n/a$3,800Est., Secondary wage estimate for mid-1950s… Researched contextReport
1980237,000n/aEst., Derived estimate Researched contextReport
1990281,000$21,600Est., Derived estimate (employment) Researched contextEst., Derived estimate (pay) Researched contextReport
2000270,670$34,740BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003264,080$35,660BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004264,070$36,720BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005265,000$37,750BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
2006268,170$38,190BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
2007266,180$38,810BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
2008257,810$39,860BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
2009244,380$41,080BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
2010228,700$41,500BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
2011220,680$42,460BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
2012216,730$42,170BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
2013220,680$42,390BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
2014212,910$42,770BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
2015202,660$43,200BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
2016191,200$44,180BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
2017185,870$44,730BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
2018176,880$46,360BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
2019168,140$47,300BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020160,950$48,980BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021155,250$47,710BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022159,940$48,780BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023152,790$50,680BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024154,540$54,140BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025156,280$55,570BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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