Five Soft Skills that Make Lawyers Better

Lawyers are the coolest people you'll ever meet. We have the soft skills that allow us to maneuver and excel in any environment. Skills that you cannot pick up anywhere else. This blog is about the soft skills that every lawyer obtains from being in law school and graduating from law school.

Becoming a lawyer means that you have studied the law or are practicing the law. You can also take it a step above and you can become a licensed attorney once you pass the bar. But even before that, Scoop, scoop, scoop back into just graduating from law school and becoming a lawyer. I truly believe that a law degree is a wonderful foundation for any job that you take, for any career that you go into. 

The first one is leadership. Leadership is such an important role in any career that you have. A lot of people say that when you go to law school, you already have a type A personality, which is said to be that you're an alpha or that you're a person who wants to stand up, you want to be called on, you want the attention, you want to dominate a conversation, those types of things. Now that does not have to be the case for every law student. However, law school does bring out a lot of the leadership skills that you will need to excel in your career. Whether you decide to run for your Student Bar Association President, whether you get involved in a different law school extracurricular such as a fraternity or a different kind of moot court, any of those things, law degree will benefit you and it will bring out leadership skills that you have that you can use when you're in the office. 

Another thing leadership is brought out in law school that you might not think about is that you decided to go to law school, so you've already chosen to be different, to be separate, to be other. You're graduating with a doctorate degree, and I know some people who've graduated from law school and call themselves doctor whatever, And that confidence, that leadership that comes out is something that you get in law school, something that you get when you become a lawyer, and it's one of those soft skills that you really cannot downplay that you learned while you're in law school. The second thing that I think is really important is management skills. Management can be anything from making sure that your law school loan money stretches out for the entire semester, lining up a course for the summertime, lining up a clerkship, preparing for on-campus interviews or OCIs, and attending those. All of those things are management skills that are outside of you, simply being a student. Those management tasks are things that we often overlook when we're in law school, but they are huge components of our life once we are out of law school. 

I worked in a mid sized law firm and I had to bill my time, which is billing your time in six minute increments for the whole day. That level of management of my day was not unusual to me because when I was in law school, I had study blocks where I knew what I was doing at any time of the day. When I was dating somebody in law school and they're like, “What are you doing? I never know what you're doing.” And I'm like…

Look at my schedule. It's right here. Between 1PM and 3PM, I'm working on contracts. I'm either in the library or you know what I mean? 

I learned to manage my time and resources as a law student, and that has served me well since law school and as a lawyer. The next thing is flexibility. Law school teaches you to be flexible because we are graded on a curve in law school. A little bit of background information. When you're in law school, you have hypothetical questions. You get to write out the different issues that are found, what things you saw, the rule of law that you saw, write your analysis, and then your conclusion. And as the professor is grading the exam, they're marking four, three, two, one, whatever it was based on what issues you found. And what happens when you're graded on a curve is that, let's say 25 people are in that course and 25 people take the final exam. 

The person who earns the highest grade sets the curve for the course, and that makes you flexible. And I know that doesn't seem like it's being flexible, but it is because that's unlike the way that you're graded when you're an undergrad. When I was an undergrad, there was a standard score or maybe even a multiple choice test, so you knew if you got this many points right, you would immediately get an A or B or whatever. That's just not the case in law school. You may find out that you received the top grade in the course, which is a Cali award. If you're that person, you just hit the curve. Law school makes you flexible not only because of the way things are graded, but because you have to learn a little bit of everything. The professor could test you on the first thing that you learned when you started that course and they could test you on the last thing that they talked about before the exams. 

You have to be flexible. You have to make sure you’re going to know a little bit of this and this and this and this because I don't know what I'm going to see on this exam. 

That flexibility is very strenuous on you when you're in law school, but it makes you really flexible when you're outside of law school. The next thing is written and verbal communication skills. Law school is all about writing. When you're a 1L student, you're going to take a legal writing course. 

You also will take a legal research course, which will teach you all about the library and Westlaw and how to find cases. That writing that you start with takes you all through school. As I just mentioned, you will take those four-hour exams, the hypothetical exams, and you're just going to be writing. You're going to be writing every single thing that your mind can think about for your IRAC, which is issue, rule, analysis, and conclusion. All of that is just writing. It's writing, it's perfecting your writing, it's clearing up your writing, it's getting it better, tweaking it, all of that is going to be writing. Those written skills that you get out of law school are just unmatched. I actually had to teach myself how to stop writing in such a formal way when I was out of law school when I started blogging and doing different things because you learn how to write in a very formal way. You're a lover of the Oxford comma. I loved having two spaces behind every period because that was what I was taught in law school. There's a lot of formalities to being a lawyer, being in law school, and learning how to write. Your verbal communications are another skill that a lot of times people underestimate when they're in law school. Law school teaches you how to advocate. It teaches you how to stand up for yourself. It teaches you how to stand up for other people. 

To advocate is to publicly recommend or support. To publicly recommend or support is to put your weight behind it to say, this is what's going happen, this is what I believe in, this is what I believe I read, this is what I believe is important. When you're in law school, you're learning how to do that for yourself, you're learning how to do that for your clients, you're learning how to do that for your classmates, you're learning how to do that for everything else. It's one of the cool things about law school that you cannot forget. It's one of those things that you can never let go of. A lot of times that advocacy comes out when you're observing someone in a courtroom, but also when I'm negotiating my rent, when I'm negotiating a salary for a job, when I am sending an email to a client to follow-up. All of those things are written and verbal communications that I learned in law school They're soft skills that serve me as a lawyer.

The next one is work ethic. Work ethic is so important as a lawyer. It's one of those things that's done in law school by the sheer demands that are made on your time. There are so many things pulling at your attention, so many things that are trying to grab you, so many things for you to do. You got to find a way to get them done. When I went to law school at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, About two weeks before school started, I received an info packet from my textbook. It also had cases that I needed to read and pages that I needed to read to prepare. Then I got another packet about contracts course and it gave me a definition that I had to memorize before I got to class that day. 

Before school officially starts, it has started because you don't want to be sitting in that class and getting cold-called on, and now you're stuck looking like a deer in the headlights with no response, and you had two weeks to prepare. Bam! You're immediately thrown into it, and it's time to get to work. Law school definitely improves your work ethic. The way that I say it is that lawyers are very good at doing 15 things and making it feel like we're doing five things. And I have had to actually tell myself, Kyla, breathe. You're allowed to do five things. Oh, okay. 

You're allowed to do eight things. You do not have to do all this stuff. And it's really hard to remember that and to find that balance because we are taught how to work at a very high level under very strict time constraints and get it done. So the last thing I think law school is really important for developing is the soft skill of teamwork. Initially when I wrote teamwork in the script, I was like, that's kinda anti. I think that's not law school. I'm a huge proponent of Southern University Law Center. The Jaguars as a team, yes. We'll crush it every day. I'm a really big proponent of the Class of 2015, which is a class that I graduated in. Yes, 100% we'll crush it. If you think about a team like that, yes. 

Teamwork falls right in line with the advocacy that lawyers learn how to do. When you think about typical teamwork, group assignments, and stuff like that, I wouldn't say that's where law school brings out any teamwork. But I had study partners at every class that I took where we would meet, hold each other accountable in the library, get work done, quiz each other. It definitely teaches teamwork in that skill. I did want to share some of the soft skills because I talk to lawyers every single week who either have pivoted into exciting career changes or have exciting interests and things that they're doing with their law degree. It is really important to think about the soft skills that law school gives you that aren't necessarily things that you would pinpoint, but they're really important things that are brought out of you when you become a lawyer. 

So I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned something new about the soft skills that every lawyer has coming out of law school. Let me know if you agree with the list, if you have anything that I missed that should be added to the list.

Until the next blog!

Kyla