Cheer Up! AI Can’t Do Everything …Yet.
What are some of the 'soft skills' essential to good lawyering? Being human is one of them.
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There’s been a lot of discussion about “soft skills” for lawyers. You can’t test for them on the bar exam. These could be included under the general rubric of competency — those attitudes and attributes that make lawyers good and good lawyers better. These are not skills that you can pick up in a bar review course.
They are skills that take time to develop and mature. Some peeps are fortunate enough to have them since childhood (whether pounded into them by parents or not), some others have to learn them, matriculating through the “school of hard knocks,” and some peeps never learn them, which contribute to complaints against lawyers.
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What are some of the “soft skills” essential to good lawyering? Last summer, ATL listed eight essential soft skills. Time for a refresher.
The first on that list is “effective communication.” Active listening (e.g., no multitasking while listening to a client, devoting complete attention, steady eye contact, and no interruptions). There’s nothing worse than being interrupted while a client is trying to explain a situation and then reverting to “now, where were we?” Insulting and disrespectful.
Another part of “effective communication” is the lawyer explaining clearly what’s going on, what may or may not happen in the future (there are no litigation crystal balls), and the expectations for both lawyer and client. This is where many attorney-client relationships break down. Example: the attorney asks the client to complete some forms so that the case can be filed, the client procrastinates, taking months to complete the forms, and then when client finally returns them, he wants the attorney to drop everything and file his case forthwith. Has this ever happened to you? (Eyes rolling back in heads.)
Another soft skill in the ATL list: “communication and teamwork.” Egos can and often do intrude into law practice, but if the goal is the best possible result, then a clash of egos may not necessarily be the worst thing. Too often we work in silos, rather than collaboratively, so we don’t know when or if we are working at cross-purposes. I always hated “attorney shopping,” that if one attorney didn’t give the answer the client wanted to hear, the client would stroll down the hall and ask a second attorney, without telling that attorney how the first attorney had given a different opinion. That’s why collaboration is so important. We can and do have differences of opinion based upon our knowledge, but our answers to clients should hopefully be consistent. If not, differences in legal opinions should be duked out within the confines of the legal department.
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How about a sense of humor? Others may not prize it, but without a sense of humor about yourself, others, and situations, life can be harder than it already is. Some lawyers think that it’s of limited or no utility in the profession and even undignified. I disagree that it further tarnishes whatever positive reputation we have (not much, IMHO). The inability to laugh at oneself, at the ridiculousness of certain statutes, of the silliness of certain procedural mandates, of the pomposity of certain colleagues — especially opposing counsel, of examples of judicial robe-itis, would make practice that much tougher than it already is, and it isn’t exactly a bed of roses these days.
The work we do is serious, and the potential consequences even more so, but the ability to separate work from life is critical. We are trained to catastrophize, trained to think of the worst possible outcomes, trained to figure out how to avoid that catastrophe, which is why a sense of humor is so important, to divert us from our worst fears, and that, aside from blowing a statute of limitations (our worst nightmare?), there is usually a fix for everything else.
Also on the ATL list are emotional intelligence, empathy, and understanding. Sometimes, a lawyer needs to just “show up” for the client, not in any physical sense necessarily, but to be there as counselor, as advisor, as someone who shows kindness and compassion when it is needed most. Although we do need detachment so that our client’s problems do not become ours, there’s a difference between detachment and connecting on a human level. Being human is what we all do best.
With all the kerfuffle about AI swirling around, its ability to pass a bar exam, to do “legal research” and other tasks that used to be within the purview of mere mortals, there is at least one thing that AI cannot do: forge that human connection between attorney and client. Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, said it best: “In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”
And yes, contrary to popular opinion, lawyers still have hearts, even if sometimes they are hard to find.
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Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for over 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.
