Date of Award

1-1-1984

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Business and Vocational Education

Abstract

The research was designed to identify the communication skills needed by legal assistants as perceived by legal assistants and the lawyers with whom they worked. Legal assistant members of the National Association of Legal Assistants (NALA) and lawyers chosen by individual NALA members were surveyed.A llist of seventy communication skills was developed by the researcher with input from lawyers and legal assistants in the Fargo, North Dakota--Moorhead, Minnesota area. The list of seventy communication skills were combined with questions to obtain demographic data to form two questionnaires: a Questionnaire for Legal Assistants and a Questionnaire for Lawyers.After a pilot study of the questionnaires was completed, revised questionnaires were sent to 522 legal assistant members of the NALA. Each legal assistant was asked to complete the Questionnaire for Legal Assistants and to choose a lawyer to complete the Questionnaire for Lawyers. Completing the questionnaire involved indicating on a scale of one to six the perceived need for each of the seventy communication skills and responding to the questions to obtain demographic data.There were 262 usable questionnaires returned by legal assistants and 174 usable questionnaires returned by lawyers. Responses were keyed into a data base for computer analysis. The percent of response by legal assistants and lawyers to each of the six categories of need for each communication skill was computed. The Kruskal-Wallis H test, with the H corrected for tied ranks, was used to test thirteen null hypotheses at the .05 level.As a result of this study, twelve communication skills were identified that can be considered essential for legal assistant members of the NALA. Forty-three communication skills were identified that can be considered important for these legal assistants. Legal assistants and lawyers agreed on the level of need for thirty-three communication skills which were found at all points along the need continuum. Twenty skills were identified by NALA members and thirty-two skills were identified by lawyers with whom they worked as important and unrelated to any of the independent variables.

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