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11 March 2014

Soft Skills Training For Lawyers – Luxury or Necessity?


Published on 11 March 2014
Education
The so-called ‘soft skills’ such as communication, social graces, habits and attitudes are often overlooked by professionals in favour of the ‘harder’ skills and knowledge areas when it comes to professional development. 
 
Soft Skills for Lawyers, by Giuseppe Giusti emphasises the importance of this, stating “It has been suggested that in a number of professions, soft skills may be more important over the long term than occupational skills. The legal profession is one example where the ability to deal with people effectively and politely, more than their mere occupational skills, can determine the professional success of a lawyer.”
 
 So it may not be enough to be expert in your area of law, or top of the class in law school if you want to progress in your legal career.
 
 The Junior Lawyers section of the Law Society UK has a section on its website called The hard work of building soft skills some of which is reproduced below:
 
"‘Soft’ or ‘people’ skills are as crucial to establishing a legal career as top qualifications or intelligence. The importance of these latter attributes has long been emphasised, but raw legal competence alone is not enough to become a successful lawyer.
 
Your legal career will depend on your ability to build good relationships. Lawyers need to win clients and keep them, while they also need to accumulate useful contacts and nurture positive relationships with their colleagues and management. This fact may seem straightforward and undeserving of your continued attention, but nearly all of us have at least one weakness, big or small, in our people skills.”
 
It is possible that many of us presume that we either have or don’t have these types of skills and that they can’t be learned or developed. That we just have a certain personality which drives our behaviour and attitudes towards other people be they staff or clients. Indeed, workplace culture may encourage a ‘tough’ no-nonsense approach to interpersonal relations which dictates against a ‘softer’ approach.
 
These soft skills are not necessarily taught at law school nor in any postgraduate law programs. Some progressive law firms no doubt run in-house programs for lawyers in this area. However if we look at the MCLE/CPD programs available during this peak period, most focus on the ‘hard’ skills and knowledge areas of legal practice.