Mastery of soft skills for lawyers — men and women, alike — is becoming more and more important all the time. In fact, I am working with some tech geniuses on a digital program for assessing these very skills, and I am very excited about the applications and potential of the program to help young practitioners improve the skills that will determine success and upward mobility.
Law schools and law firms are not providing most of this content, ostensibly for curriculum control and cost containment reasons, and, yet, research confirms that 80% of success in business is attributable to soft skills. The law profession is no exception.
Although the emphasis on soft skills may be new, the concepts themselves are not. The buzz words and the research confirming the importance of soft skills simply have raised the visibility of these concepts. We always have known the importance of communication skills, networking skills and inner office politics, for instance. The labels have just changed, and we have upped the ante for developing these skills. You are either in the game with these skills or you are on the sidelines without them.
I have been writing and speaking about the importance of “soft skills” for years, including chapters in my first book, Best Friends at the Bar: What Women Need to Know about a Career in the Law, Wolters Kluwer/Aspen Publishers, 2009. Chapters devoted to the following subjects make the case: Be a Team Player; Find Good Mentors; Ask for Help When You Need It; Find a Comfort Zone for Promoting Work; Treat Support Staff Well; and Watch Your Mouth. The fact that my books are targeted to women lawyers should not work as a limitation of any kind. All lawyers, men and women, alike, need soft skills to succeed in the profession.
To discuss soft skills, we first must define the “hard skills” that lawyers need and eliminate them from the discussion. The hard skills are the ones that come to mind first when most young lawyers contemplate what they need to succeed in the law. Those include intelligence, strong analytical skills, excellent writing skills, good judgment, and diligence (including lack of procrastination). These are the kinds of skills that most law schools concentrate on in developing practice-ready graduates and preparing them to pass bar exams.
While it is true that these hard skills are critical to success in the law profession, they are not enough. There is so much more that goes into being successful as a lawyer, and those things cannot be overlooked. Disregarding them is to proceed at your own risk and setting yourself up for almost certain disappointment.
To quote a friend of mine, a partner in the largest law firm in the world, “Everyone in our firm is smart. Some are smarter than others. The degree of smart is not what typically determines success. It is the soft skills. The ones who pay attention to the soft skills generally fare better than the others.”
Here’s a list of some of the soft skills that you need to develop:
Being a good communicator and a good listener;
Having the ability to accept feedback and use it positively it improve your product;
Learning to network and develop work;
Having a good attitude about work and getting the job done;
Becoming a good time manager;
Having adaptability to a variety of job settings;
Being assertive in the workplace to get the best experience possible;
Being comfortable with collaboration and being a member of a team;
Having confidence in yourself and your abilities;
Being polite and courteous;
Being a creative thinker;
Developing management and leadership skills;
Developing negotiation skills;
Being astute about office politics;
Having a sense of humor and not taking yourself too seriously;
Developing and using emotional intelligence;
Being empathetic; and
Finding mentors and becoming a mentor to others.
Master these soft skills to compliment the hard skills, and you will distinguish yourself from the crowd. To do that, you will have to get out of your office, get to know the people you work with, volunteer for assignments, go to the social events, and take advantage of the opportunity to have the other members of the firm get to know you. Grinding it out at your computer day in and day out to bill more hours than anyone else without even going to lunch with colleagues is a big mistake. When your name comes up in an associate review or later in consideration for partner, you do not want the decision makers wondering who on earth you are.
Make the decision makers aware of you by mastering the soft skills.
