6 Soft Skills Prized in Legal Professionals

To qualify for work in law firms and legal departments, knowledge of the law and skill in research and drafting is a must. To advance your career or standout when applying for a new position, you’ll need to showcase your strongest “soft skills” as well as your hard qualifications.

What Are Soft Skills?

“Soft skills,” also known as “transferable skills,” are skills that can be developed and applied successfully in a wide range of professions and careers. Often they’re the abilities that make your field-specific work possible. They include abilities like communication, time management, attention to detail and teamwork.

Most legal professionals are qualified for a position because they possess similar technical skills. What sets them apart from one another are the strength of their soft skills and the relevance of those strengths to the position and organization.

To advance your career and stand out from the candidate crowd, which soft skills should you develop? Here are six top soft skills that hiring managers prize in legal professionals:

Communication

Communication skills are essential for legal professionals, who must often “translate” between lawyers and non-legal parties like witnesses and experts. Strong writing and analysis skills often fall under this category for legal professionals as well.

Organization

Paying attention to the details of a number of cases demands good organizational skills and an ability to prioritize information and tasks.

Confidentiality

The ability to maintain strong standards of confidentiality is essential in any legal practice. Legal support staff who can articulate how they address confidentiality issues can often set themselves apart from those who treat confidentiality as a vague, nebulous obligation.

Time Management

Most legal support professionals juggle several cases and tasks in any given day. The ability to manage your time well will lead to greater efficiency and lower stress.

Teamwork

Legal support professionals are prized as integral members of a team. Listening skills and the ability to coordinate your work with others’ tasks are two highly prized qualities that fall under general soft skill rubric of “teamwork.”

“Big-Picture” Thinking

You may have been asked to track down an obscure case or find information on a specific technical detail for a client – but every task fits into a larger case or goal. Understanding the “big picture” and how details fit into it makes a legal professional more thorough and efficient, and hiring managers know it.

To learn more about job opportunities available in the Toronto area or how to present your soft skills to their best advantage, talk to the recruiters at Kent Legal today.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *