# Soft Skills for Lawyers: What They Are and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-for-lawyers/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-for-lawyers.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The soft skills for lawyers that matter most: explaining advice plainly, listening to clients, persuading, and managing deadlines. Answers for new lawyers. ## Key facts - Title: Soft Skills for Lawyers: What They Are and How to Build Them - Category: What Are Soft Skills - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Time Management - Primary keyword: soft skills for lawyers - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-for-lawyers/ ## What this page covers - The soft skills for lawyers that matter most: explaining advice plainly, listening to clients, persuading, and managing deadlines. Answers for new lawyers. - Practical guidance for soft skills for lawyers - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The soft skills for lawyers that matter most are explaining advice so a client can act on it, listening for what the client actually needs, persuading people you have no authority over, and managing a workload set by other people's deadlines. Working well with supervising lawyers and handling pressure round out the list. Each is learned behavior, not temperament. Legal training tends to point elsewhere. Years of exams reward the sharpest analysis, so it is reasonable to expect the strongest analyst to become the lawyer everyone relies on. Practice adds a second test that law school rarely sets: whether your analysis reaches the client, the partner and the other side in a form they can use. That second test is graded mostly by people who never read your research, and it turns on a short list of specific habits. ## What soft skills do lawyers need? Seven come up again and again in legal work, and each one shows up as concrete behavior rather than a vague quality: - Communication: telling a client the answer, the risk and the options in plain language, and listening long enough to learn what they actually need. - Influence: persuading a client, a counterparty or a supervising lawyer, on the strength of a reputation for accurate, honest work. - Time management: clarifying what each request needs and when it is truly due, and keeping several matters moving without dropping one. - Teamwork: being reliable on a matter team, sharing what you know, and disagreeing about the work without making it personal. - Working with your manager: in a firm, usually a supervising partner or senior associate, whose expectations you need to understand and whose time you need to use well. - Professional behaviors: respect for everyone from the client to the support staff, punctuality, and careful handling of confidential information. - Resilience: recovering from a heavily marked-up draft or a lost argument without losing the next week to it. Empathy is often added to the list. In legal practice it mostly shows up as the listening half of communication: hearing the worry behind a client's question before you answer the question itself. ## Why are soft skills important for lawyers? Because clients judge lawyers on different grounds than lawyers judge themselves. In studies of American lawyers and their clients described in Randall Kiser's *Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer*, lawyers ranked legal expertise as the most important quality, while clients put regular communication, listening and responsiveness at the top. The gap has a simple cause. Most clients cannot evaluate the legal analysis itself, so they judge what they can experience directly: whether they were kept informed, whether they felt heard, whether their calls and emails were answered promptly. A sound opinion can still leave a client dissatisfied if it arrives after days of silence, because the silence is the part they can see. The fix is unglamorous and fully within your control: regular updates, even short ones, and a clear sense of when the client will next hear from you. Kim Tasso's 2020 report *Essential Soft Skills for Lawyers*, based on a literature review and interviews with lawyers, found strong support for the [importance of empathy](/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/empathy-soft-skills/) in legal work. Clients often come to a lawyer in the middle of something stressful, such as a dispute, a high-stakes deal or a personal crisis, and advice lands better once they feel understood. ## Are soft skills more important than legal knowledge for lawyers? No, and the question sets up a contest that does not exist in practice. Legal knowledge is the entry requirement; a lawyer whose analysis cannot be trusted will not last. Soft skills decide how much of that knowledge reaches anyone else. A 2019 paper by Dagmar Charvátová of Charles University goes as far as arguing that a lawyer's hard skills are of little use without soft skills, and it points to earlier research finding that lawyers often lack these skills and tend to undervalue them. Law students appear to sense the balance. In Bloomberg Law's 2022 survey on how prepared law students are for practice, students named communication as the top characteristic of a successful attorney, ahead of research and self-management. The practical reading: keep building your legal knowledge, and treat the nontechnical side as a second skill set that deserves the same deliberate practice. Unlike doctrine, it rarely comes with a syllabus, but it improves the same way. ## How do lawyers communicate better with clients? Start with the answer. Legal training builds the opposite habit: you construct the argument step by step, issue by issue, before you reach a conclusion. A client usually needs that order reversed, with the conclusion first, then the risk, then the options and what each would cost them. The analysis can follow if they ask for it. New lawyers often bury the answer the client came for on page three. Stating the bottom line in the first sentence is one of the quickest ways to become useful, both to clients and to the senior lawyers who review your drafts. Three other habits do most of the remaining work: - Listen for the actual need. A client asking whether they can terminate a contract may really be asking how to leave a business relationship without a lawsuit. Ask what outcome they want before you answer the narrow question. - Adapt to the person. An in-house lawyer may want the reasoning and the citations; a founder or a private client usually wants a decision they can make by Friday. - Choose the medium deliberately. [Bad news](/knowledge/communication/how-to-write-an-email-to-a-client/), sensitive issues and anything that invites negotiation go better in a conversation than in a long email. Use writing for the record and for detail the client needs time to absorb. None of this is courtroom performance. Most of a junior lawyer's client communication happens in emails, calls and short meetings, and those are exactly where these habits get built. ## What soft skills do law firms look for in new associates? Above all, the ones new lawyers most often lack. In Bloomberg Law's 2022 preparedness survey, practicing attorneys rated new lawyers weakest on client interactions and on leadership skills. Both can be practiced from your first matter. Client interactions are covered above. Leadership, at the start of a legal career, means something narrower than running a team: getting people to act on your work when you have no authority over them. That is persuasion, and it runs through everyday legal work well beyond the courtroom: negotiating with opposing counsel, convincing a client to accept advice they did not want, persuading a supervising lawyer that an argument holds. In each case, whether the other person trusts your [credibility](/knowledge/influence/professional-credibility/) often decides whether your argument is heard at all. For a junior lawyer, that credibility comes from a track record: research that turns out to be accurate, deadlines that are met, and honest assessments that include the weak points of your own position. A partner who learns that your memos flag the problems as well as the strengths starts to rely on your judgment, and that reliance is where a junior lawyer's influence begins. Firms also notice the basics of working on a matter team: doing what you committed to, sharing what you know with the associates beside you, and keeping disagreements about the work rather than the person. ## How do junior lawyers deal with deadlines and long hours? Mostly by managing commitments, not by working faster. Legal work runs on deadlines set outside your control, such as court filing dates, limitation periods and transaction closings, and many firms add billable-hour targets on top. A junior lawyer usually takes work from several senior lawyers at once, and each of them sees only their own request. Those requests rarely arrive on a schedule that suits you. If you have watched a "quick" request land at four in the afternoon, this will sound familiar. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described her internship like this: > Every day, I aimed to leave on time — it was an unpaid internship — and I was usually on top of what I wanted to finish that day. But every day, an urgent task came in at three or four in the afternoon, so I always ended up going home at 5:30 anyway. It was as if my time didn't matter, while everyone else's time mattered a lot. You cannot stop late requests, but you can shape what happens next. Before you start, clarify four things: who is asking, what exactly they need, when it is actually due (not "ASAP"), and what a finished result looks like, whether that is a two-paragraph email to the partner or a fully cited memo. Confirm your understanding in a short message. When [two requests clash](/knowledge/time-management/managing-conflicting-priorities/), say so early and let the people who assigned them settle the order, rather than discovering late at night that both were due first thing tomorrow. Over the longer run, decide in advance when an ordinary working day ends, and protect some evenings and weekends whenever the matter calendar allows. Demanding stretches come with legal practice; unplanned late nights every week are a habit, and habits can be changed. ## Can you learn soft skills, or are lawyers just born with them? You can learn them. Randall Kiser makes this case in *Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer* (Cambridge University Press, 2017), treating competencies such as client relations and managing stress as skills that improve with practice rather than fixed traits. If you do not feel naturally "good with people," that describes a gap in practice, not a verdict on your personality, and closing it does not require you to become more outgoing than you are. The method is the one you already used to learn the law: deliberate repetition with feedback. Pick one behavior per matter, such as leading every client email with the answer or confirming every deadline in writing, and ask the supervising lawyer afterward what worked. A specific question ("Was my summary for the client at the right level of detail?") gets far more useful feedback than "How did I do?" ## Do law schools teach soft skills? Not consistently. According to a 2026 BARBRI-sponsored survey of more than 300 law students, associates, partners and staff, 52% of law students said their school does only a "fair" or "poor" job of developing soft skills. Bloomberg Law's 2022 survey found no consensus on whose job it is: law schools, undergraduate programs and employers were all named as responsible. In practice, most of the learning falls to you, on the job. That is less bleak than it sounds, because every client call, research memo and negotiation is a chance to practice. What you need is a sense of where to aim. Nobody has graded you on these skills the way exams graded your legal analysis, so it helps to [map your own starting point](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you decide which ones to practice first. ## Is AI making soft skills more important for lawyers? Many lawyers think so. In the same BARBRI-sponsored survey, 77% of law students, 75% of associates and 58% of partners said AI has made soft skills more critical for professional advancement. Whatever the tools take over, earning a client's trust, moving the other side and understanding what a supervising lawyer actually needs remain work done between people. At the start of a legal career, that makes these skills something to invest in now rather than a refinement for later. ## The skills that carry your legal work to the people who need it Read across these answers and a pattern shows. The legal analysis was rarely what decided the outcome. What decided it was how that analysis reached another person: a client who needed a decision, a partner who needed to trust the memo, an opponent who needed a reason to move. Timing mattered as much as content. Three skills sit behind most of those moments. **Communication** is where the distance between legal training and client expectations is widest. In practice it means a genuine effort to understand what the client needs before answering, stating the main point first, keeping it clear, direct and brief, and adapting to how the listener thinks rather than how a law professor would. It also means choosing the medium: a hard message usually belongs in a conversation, with an email afterward for the record. The goal is not eloquence. It is expertise that someone without a law degree can act on. **Influence** is how a junior lawyer moves people they cannot instruct. It rests first on a well-earned reputation: consistent delivery, integrity, and assessments people learn they can trust. On a specific point it works as a process: prepare by understanding what is in it for the client, counterparty or partner, make the case simply and show the drawbacks alongside the strengths, then follow up until the decision is carried out. This is persuasion without manipulation, and it starts with the matters already on your desk. **Time Management** in legal work is less about speed than about commitments. It means clarifying who is asking, what exactly is needed, when it is truly due and what finished looks like before you begin; putting important work ahead of merely urgent work; checking in early with whoever assigned the task; and flagging a clash before it turns into a missed deadline. It also covers deciding when your day ends and keeping some time free of work, so that demanding stretches stay stretches rather than becoming a permanent state. All three are hard to see from the inside. Clients seldom tell you how an email landed, and partners seldom explain why they trust one associate's memos more than another's. That is the case for [an outside read on your habits](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/): the **free Job Skills Test** scores these three alongside the **other workplace skills it covers** and shows which one is furthest behind. A gap it finds is a behavior to practice on your next matter, not a fixed limit. ## What your legal training already gives you Parts of this may already sound like how you work. If you have rewritten a memo so its first line answered the question the partner actually asked, or checked whether "by end of day" meant six o'clock or first thing tomorrow, you have practiced communication and time management on live work, whether or not you called them skills. The habits that feel less natural are the ones you have had fewer chances to rehearse, and you can build them in your own register: a quiet, precise lawyer does not need to become a showman to be persuasive. As you take on clients of your own and become the person others on a matter rely on, more of the result rides on these habits, and the matters on your desk today are the easiest place to practice them. The useful question now is which one to start with. ## Choose your first skill to practice What remains is a starting point. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: it takes 7 minutes, scores you across all twelve, and shows which ones would make the biggest difference to your work right now. One practical way to use it: take the test, pick the skill your results put furthest behind, and practice it deliberately on the matter in front of you this month. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The soft skills for lawyers that matter most: explaining advice plainly, listening to clients, persuading, and managing deadlines. Answers for new lawyers. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Influence, Time Management. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/time-management.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/what-are-soft-skills/soft-skills-for-lawyers/ Preferred summary: "The soft skills for lawyers that matter most: explaining advice plainly, listening to clients, persuading, and managing deadlines. Answers for new lawyers." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.