UK AI Exposure · Administrative and secretarial occupations
Legal secretaries
Legal secretaries file and maintain legal and other records, transcribe notes and dictation into typewritten form and perform other routine clerical tasks in legal practices.
- Employees (UK)
- 22k
- Median annual pay
- £24,263
- Exposure score ?
- 3.7/10 Low direct 3.7 · with tools 10.0
- Wage exposure
- £198m
Higher exposure than 92% of the 379 UK occupations we scored.
What this score means
A handful of tasks in this role are touchable by AI, mostly around paperwork, scheduling and basic writing. The shape of the role stays the same - some parts just get faster.
If you're in this role, here's what to do now
Pick the two or three most repetitive things in your week and try an LLM on them. Most people underestimate what Claude or ChatGPT can already do for admin-shaped work. The time you get back is the dividend.
The tasks in this role, ranked by AI exposure
Below are the real tasks O*NET records for this occupation, sorted highest exposure first. "AI can do this" means a language model can already handle the task directly. "AI can help" means an LLM can assist but not replace. "Human work" means today's AI doesn't touch it. Importance is O*NET's 1–5 rating of how central each task is to the role.
5 of 14 tasks in this role are things an AI can already do today. Task list mapped via O*NET "Legal Secretaries and Administrative Assistants" (43-6012.00).
Mail, fax, or arrange for delivery of legal correspondence to clients, witnesses, and court officials.
Prepare and distribute invoices to bill clients or pay account expenses.
Prepare, proofread, or process legal documents, such as summonses, subpoenas, complaints, appeals, motions, or pretrial agreements.
Complete various forms, such as accident reports, trial and courtroom requests, and applications for clients.
Draft and type office memos.
Organize and maintain law libraries, documents, and case files.
Make photocopies of correspondence, documents, and other printed matter.
Assist attorneys in collecting information such as employment, medical, and other records.
Receive and place telephone calls.
Schedule and make appointments.
Submit articles and information from searches to attorneys for review and approval for use.
Make travel arrangements for attorneys.
Attend legal meetings, such as client interviews, hearings, or depositions, and take notes.
Review legal publications and perform database searches to identify laws and court decisions relevant to pending cases.
Where a project with Alex usually starts for this role
These are the highest-importance tasks in this role that a language model can already handle directly. In a typical engagement the first wins come from building workflows around these, so they stop eating your team's time.
-
Mail, fax, or arrange for delivery of legal correspondence to clients, witnesses, and court officials.
-
Prepare and distribute invoices to bill clients or pay account expenses.
-
Prepare, proofread, or process legal documents, such as summonses, subpoenas, complaints, appeals, motions, or pretrial agreements.
Every role has three or four wedges like these. Finding them takes an hour. Turning them into a workflow your team actually uses takes a few days. Talk to Alex about a project →
Stay on top of this
One email a week, written for people who aren't AI nerds. What's actually real, what's hype, and what smart operators are doing about it.
Get the weekly note
One email a week from Alex on how AI is changing UK work, how to get ahead of it, and what smart operators are actually doing. Written for people who aren't AI nerds.
Free. Unsubscribe any time.
Or go deeper:
Methodology
This role's exposure score comes from Eloundou et al's 2023 GPT task labels, aggregated by O*NET importance within each O*NET-SOC code, then bridged to UK SOC 2020 via ISCO-08 (ONS Vol 2 coding index) and US SOC 2010 (BLS crosswalk). Employment and median pay come from ONS ASHE Table 14.7a, 2025 provisional. ASHE covers employees only, so self-employed workers are not counted.
Get the weekly note. One email on how AI is changing UK work.