The rise of the "human skills" lawyer

As technical legal work falls into the vortex of generative AI, we need to redesign lawyer formation to engage and develop the humanity of legal professionals.

Illustration by Midjourney

We can’t develop lawyers unless we know exactly what lawyers are supposed to do. That’s been the underlying premise of all my work on lawyer licensing and competence over the past several years. It’s why I’ve advised legal regulators to develop “competence profiles” that set out the knowledge and skills required of lawyers at the start of and throughout their careers.

I’ve written, here and elsewhere, about rethinking and reforming the “knowledge” piece of lawyer competence. Today I want to talk about the “skills” part, because just as generative AI is overturning all our assumptions about lawyer knowledge, it’s about to create similar havoc in the world of lawyer skills.

You can’t get very far into any conversation about the competence of a lawyer before you run into the term “soft skills.” This is a category more easily populated than defined. Inside the “soft skills” box, you’ll find abilities such as working in teams, showing empathy, persuading others, exercising cultural fluency, and managing stress — most of which have only recently begun to appear in professional skill conversations.

But these are only examples; what does the term actually mean? “Soft skills” is rarely well defined in the legal profession; more often, it’s used as a basket to collect what many lawyers (especially, it must be said, the older male ones) consider to be lower-tier, complementary, touchy-feely stuff. “Soft skills” implies a separate and presumably more authentic set of abilities called “hard skills,” ostensibly superior but also rarely identified.

So I set out to do a couple of things: Come up with better names and definitions for these equally important categories, and identify which lawyer skills fall into each one. With some help from Twitter (especially Ron Friedmann and Rebecca Brizi) on the first point, I’m going with:

• Technical Skills (formerly “hard”): A person applies techniques, tools, and know-how to perform practical tasks specific to a particular job, industry or profession. Technical skills are often (but not always) applied to objects or ideas rather than to people. They are usually acquired and honed through education and training.

• Human Skills (formerly “soft”): A person applies character traits, attributes, and qualities to perform interpersonal tasks. Human skills are almost always applied to people and in social situations rather than to objects. They are often considered innate, but they can be developed through education and training.

These are imperfect definitions, far from airtight — as we’ll see, some skills have elements of both technicality and humanness, while others fall somewhere in between the two categories. But for our purposes, I think these are helpful guide paths.

Now we need to assign various lawyer skills to each category. Once again I reached out to Twitter and received a raft of good suggestions. Combined with my own inventory of lawyer skills, I came up with the following simple chart and provided 12 examples for each column (more could easily be added):

A few notes:

• “Business operations” covers a host of skills such as sales, marketing, and financial literacy.

• “Fiduciary relations” covers relationships with clients and others to whom the lawyer owes a fiduciary responsibility.

• “Interpersonal relations” covers all other personal relationships (colleagues, staff, employers, opponents, etc).

A few more:

• Some important skills have one foot in each column. “Advising clients” is both a legal science and a human art. The same would apply to “Negotiation.”

• While a lawyer’s exercise of “Judgment” is based in part on legal expertise, I think it’s informed mostly by their character and humanity.

• I’d divide the all-important “Communication” ability into both “written” (more a technical skill) and “personal” (more a human skill) versions.

One final note of importance: Almost everything in the “Technical Skills” column is taught to lawyers in law school, during bar admission courses, or in CLE programs. Almost nothing in the “Human Skills” column can be found in any of those curricula or programming. The legal profession goes to great lengths to inculcate “technical skills” in lawyers — but it leaves lawyers entirely on their own to develop “human skills,” or even to discover that these skills exist and that they’re important.

So there are two points I want to make here.

The first is that, even if we weren’t entering a period of significant upheaval in the legal profession, we would need to restructure lawyer learning (both during and after the point of licensure) to introduce and properly develop lawyers’ “human skills.” As it stands, we’ve been educating and training generations of “half-lawyers,” adept technically but adrift personally. The consequences — unfulfilled lawyers and unhappy clients — are obvious to anyone who cares to look for them.

The second point is that, as you’ll have noticed, we are entering a period of significant upheaval, and the current star of that show is Generative AI, manifesting in the legal sector as Large Language Models. And when you look at the list of things that LLMs currently do well and are likely to do better in future — and you compare it with the “Technical Lawyer Skills” list — well, you start to see more than a little overlap.

Now, I’m not saying lawyers will no longer be called upon to identify and analyze legal issues — but they’re going to have access to a machine that’s really good at doing those things really quickly. (And I am saying most lawyers will not be called upon to do research and drafting at all.) And that’s just based on current LLMs that are only a few months old; in a few years’ time, you can expect to see a lot more pink on this list.

More to the point, look at the second column, the “Human Skills” — I’m very hard-pressed to see how even highly advanced and incredibly accurate LLMs will displace lawyers from using these abilities. The legal profession seems to understand this — that’s why we hear so much about how Generative AI will free up lawyers to do “higher-value work.” Some of that higher-value work is in the red column (advocacy, risk analysis); but most of it is in the blue.

And really, this should come as no surprise. Ask clients what they value most about their lawyers, and sure, you’ll hear comments like: “They’re the leading expert in this area,” “They’re a bulldog litigator,” and so on. But more often, you’ll hear: “They helped me through a terrible time,” “They kept me informed and engaged on my case,” “They really understood my business/personal situation,” “They showed good judgment and gave me good advice.” It’s the lawyer as person, not as technician, that resonates most with those we serve.

Lawyers with strong “Human Skills” historically have been those with prosperous client relationships, happy colleagues and employees, healthy personal lives, and highly profitable businesses. That’s not some weird coincidence; that’s the way we’re supposed to be. We lost that thread decades ago, and ever since, we’ve been raising up cohorts of brilliant legal technicians with closed minds and cold hearts, to everyone’s detriment.

That’s going to change someday soon, thanks to Generative AI’s inevitable consumption of technical legal work. So we need to start responding to this coming transformation of our profession right now, by right-sizing the technical instruction of lawyers in the post-AI world and (finally) introducing and elevating education, training, and practice in the Human Skills of lawyering.

Law schools, this is for you. Licensing authorities, this is for you. Professional development people in law firms, this is for you. We need to restore the development of humanity in lawyers, and we need you to take the lead.