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Whether you work for a single organization to help them stay compliant as a business, or you work with individuals to help them resolve legal conflicts, your legal career depends on a wide array of skills that you acquire over time. Many who embark on the journey of attaining legal education firmly believe that a degree is enough to handle the job. Alas, it takes so much more than knowledge to provide legal services in any capacity. In fact, other skills that continuously evolve are often more pertinent to resolving a complicated case than your book knowledge alone. Organizational and Interpersonal Skills
However, as an evolving career that it is, being a lawyer means that you’re willing to keep working on your skills, even outside of those strict, legal boundaries. Here, we’ve listed a few of the most vital skills and abilities any legal professional needs to succeed and to become a prominent lawyer in your field. Work on them, and you’ll be able to grow your career on a much stronger foundation than with your legal knowledge alone.
Retaining that poker face
If you are working as a personal injury lawyer, you already know how difficult it can be to handle your clients’ emotional outbursts, or the stone-cold faces of the opposing counsel when you’re meeting them for the first time. However, your ability to calmly face accusations, help your clients remain calm, and avoid divulging any information when unnecessary will make you a far better lawyer.
Controlling your own emotional reaction and your tone of voice can mean the difference between reassuring your client and further causing turmoil in the case. That is why this skill can be of paramount importance when you’re dealing with a complex case with a client who needs your support and stability. It takes time to practice such composure, but perhaps breathing exercises and meditation can help you reach that state of mind more quickly, and give you the needed mental capacity for emotionally intricate conflicts.
Spotless time-management
Lawyers rarely work on a single case at any given time. Add to that, balancing a client’s needs with your time availability and other requirements of your legal system can be tricky enough as it is. All these and many other factors that vary from one case to another will impact how easy it will be for you to allocate your work hours towards any case and any individual client.
However, that is precisely what you need to work on over the years, to refine your time management well enough so that both your client is satisfied with the progress, and that you don’t sacrifice your quality of work provided. You can use digital tools to monitor your calendar, set up notifications to always remember appointments, and set aside a designated amount of time for self-care in order to lead a balanced life and boost your energy for your work endeavors.
Effective negotiation and conflict resolution
Investigative work is rarely enough to lead to a positive outcome in any legal case. Of course, it’s pivotal to do your research and look at the case from all possible angles in order to cover all of your bases. However, it’s necessary to be able to negotiate with all parties involved, and resolve conflicts especially in business settings.
For example, if you are working with an employment law firm and handling a wide array of employee disputes and possible HR-related conflicts, you need to be able to manage multiple relationships at a time. How you communicate and negotiate will help any business hire the best possible candidate, reduce the risk of conflict, and in case an issue does occur, it will allow you to do your job more easily because you’ve managed to establish a clear line of communication.
Diminishing distractions
Any great legal mind often comes across a complex case that will stretch for months at a time. Unlike those small-scale legal issues that get resolved over a few sessions, these lengthy proceedings will require all of your focus and dedication to tackle them from every possible angle. However, as any human being, you’ll likely find it difficult to stay productive with all the various distractions you face every day.
In order to deliver your work in time, and to retain the quality of your services, you should definitely work on eliminating those distractions while you work. If you work in a busy legal office, you might benefit from a pair of noise-canceling headphones. In case you’re distracted by your phone’s
notifications, even simple steps such as muting your phone can make all the difference. Take these precautions to keep distractions at a minimum, and you’ll be able to slowly boost your effectiveness as a legal professional.
As a lawyer, you’ll come across people from all walks of life, and how you approach them will make all the difference in how successful you’ll be with their needs and potential legal cases you tackle. As much as you should invest time and ongoing effort to learn more about the changing legal system in your country, you should also work on yourself as someone who works with people and who needs to refine their skills continuously. These particular skills are vital for any post, but consider them particularly relevant for your legal career, and you’ll reap the rewards for years to come simply by developing them over time.
