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LEGAL SECRETARY DUTIES:
KEEPING AN ORGANIZED BANKRUPTCY FOLDER | PART 4
REMAINING SUB-FOLDERS
This is the final blog in a series that details how our legal secretaries set up and organize our bankruptcy folders at Paralegal Power Company.
These blogs are designed to help the solo attorney or small firm train and organize legal support staff. This particular training is in the area of law of bankruptcy but can be applied to many other areas of law.
In our last blog, we went over the Drafting Documents Folder.
Picking up from where we left off, we have the remaining folders:
- Pleadings
- Drafts
- File-Stamped
- Suggestions
- Templates
- Notes
- Invoices
Pleadings
The Pleadings Folder is only for pleadings filed in this case. If you receive bankruptcy pleadings from a previous or related case, or any other court pleading, in the client’s paperwork, it should go in the Drafting Documents Folder.
Drafts
This folder contains pleadings that the paralegal and attorney are working on. You will not be in this folder much.
File-Stamped
As a legal secretary, you will be filing the pleadings as they come through via email from the court. Those pleadings go in this folder.
To get to the document from the email notice you will click on the hyperlinked number and download the pdf to your computer. Then you will label the pleading the docket number and then the title to the pleading.
For example, the first pleading filed in every bankruptcy case is the Voluntary Petition, therefore it will be labeled:
1 Voluntary Petition
When you open the document you will see a stamp at the top margin of the pleading that typically has the docket number, case number and date.
There’s No Hyperlinked Number, What Do I Do?
However, in every case, there are entries that do not have docket numbers. The pleadings without docket numbers should be labeled the date they were entered according to Paralegal Power format and the title of the pleading or entry.
Sometimes these entries without docket numbers do not have a hyperlink for you to click on, therefore there is no pdf to download and save. In that case, you just pdf the email itself. Again, save it as the docket number and name or date and name.
For example, if the “Clerk’s Evidence of Repeat Filing” comes through as an email from the court on a case on January 19, 2020, it will not have a hyperlinked docket number so you will have to pdf the email and save it as the document. This is what it should look like in the file:
2020.01.19 Clerk’s Evidence of Repeat Filing
Suggestions
This folder will contain draft and filed Suggestions, which are pleadings that need to be filed in any state court cases that the clients may have civil monetary judgments against them in. You will save any file-stamped Suggestions In Bankruptcy in this folder.
Templates
This folder is where we keep our pleading templates. This is pretty self-explanatory and will not be a folder you have to use much.
Notes
This is a folder where you will put any notes from our client to us. Many times clients will send a post-it note along with their documents. This must also always be scanned and saved in the file. It should be dated, the day we received it unless the client dated it on the date it was written. And then labeled “Note fr Clt.”
Invoices
If the client submits an invoice that they received from our attorneys, it should be filed here.
These minor tasks like keeping organized folders may seem small. They certainly are not the most exciting tasks of the paralegal profession. However, these are the great things that you do to keep your firm together.
Further, you may just be starting your paralegal career, or maybe you have been at it for some time. Remember after seven years of experience with other minimal requirements you could become a Certified Paralegal or maybe even start your own paralegal business.
This concludes our series on keeping an organized bankruptcy folder. If you missed any part of this series, click here to start from the beginning of the series. Or if you would prefer to have this series as an ebook, click here and find it on our Resource Page.
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About the Author
Valentina Zapata Harris
Mother | Advocate | Blogger