Don’t Forget the Soft Skills: They Will Serve You Well

In life, soft skills tend to lend themselves to many different positive personal qualities and traits, along with training strong communicators. All of these defining features will be critical to your law career in helping you relate to others and be effective in the cases for which you will eventually be responsible. Not only will soft skills serve you well in training you how to work with clients better, but they will prepare you for dealing with many different personalities in the workplace, at the courthouse, and everywhere you encounter other people regularly as a trial attorney.

Believe it or not, there are some proponents today who believe the central focus should be placed on hard skills only. When you consider all that is gained from soft skills, however, it may be incomprehensible to you that anyone would find such learning unimportant. If you are an online law student at California Desert Trial Academy College of Law, the soft school courses you will take center around:

• Negotiation
• Time management
• Ethics
• Professional conduct
• Critical thinking
• Creative thinking
• Research skills
• Presentation skills
• Personal appearance
• Core values

Soft skills also focus on empathy, sympathy and the importance of understanding where other human beings are coming from during exceedingly difficult legal and personal situations. A good example of where this all comes together too is in negotiating. In such a process, not only must you put your research skills to work beforehand, but if you want to truly see everyone win, you must understand both parties in dispute, how they came to be at the negotiating table, and why it is so important to them to either hold on to something without compromise—or to win at all cost.

All your soft skill learning may come into play during such a time, and especially your creative thinking if there is a stalemate and you are left to coax the players back into discussions. Along with everyone else, your patience may be sorely tested, leaving you to rely on your strengths in professional conduct, presentation—and in the end, time management, if everyone just begins wasting the other’s time!

In comparison, hard skills focus on areas like contracts, tort law, criminal law, constitutional law, real property, wills and trusts, and more.

Are you interested in becoming a skilled lawyer and negotiator? Our mission at CDTA College of Law is to educate, train, and develop extraordinary legal advocates. Your legal education will be comprised of bar-tested academic subjects, skills training, and values reinforcement. Upon completion of your 4-year course of study you will be fully qualified to take and pass the California Bar examination. Call us today at (760) 342-0900 or find out more online here.