Legal Executives
A survey of 832 Legal Executives in 2009 found 82 per cent were from families in which parents had not gone to university.241 A third of respondents had been legal secretaries before while others held para-legal and more general secretarial roles.
Encouragement from employer or colleagues was a factor in nearly half of the respondents deciding to qualify. Just under half (44 per cent) had received financial support from their employer. Others (36 per cent) had been unable to afford to study full-time at university and some saw CILEx as the quickest route to qualifying as a lawyer (26 per cent).Nearly three-quarters of respondents to the CILEx survey were employed full-time. Of those working in the legal sector, most (57 per cent) were fee-earners. The remainder were legal secretaries, managing other legal work or handling non-legal work. Some 35 per cent had management or supervisory responsibilities. Conveyancing was the most common practice area (31 per cent), followed by personal injury (18 per cent), probate/wills (16 per cent), family (16 per cent), general litigation (12 per cent) and debt recovery (11 per cent). These areas were followed by commercial work, employment, housing and criminal defence.
VI.