Hard Skills & Soft Skills: Why Both Are So Important in Law School

During your four years of law school, you will be taking in an immense amount of knowledge and soaking up a lot of facts, to include hard skills and soft skills. While this conventional practice is vital to educating you so that you can pass the California state bar as well as go on to have a fulfilling practice as a trial attorney, there may be times when you wonder why you must take one course or another. Some courses may seem more valuable to you than others and students you go to class with may find that some coursework resonates more with them then it does with you.

There is sometimes a controversial discussion over hard skills and soft skills, and whether or not soft skills really rate at the same priority level as hard skills. At CDTA we believe it is very important you learn about the following when it comes to hard skills:

• Contracts
• Torts
• Criminal law civil procedure
• Constitutional law
• Evidence
• Real property
• Wills and trusts
• Criminal procedure
• Business enterprises
• Remedies
• Professional responsibility

Looking at that list you may not feel like all those hard skills are going to be vital to your future; for instance, do you need to know about business enterprises? Why do you need to understand about professional responsibility? These are of course areas where you should grow to have great expertise over a lifetime, as you will be dealing with business people for the rest of your career as an attorney. Professional responsibility allows you to understand more about what it means to have and maintain a professional manner, what it means to be ethical, along with other issues that must be taken into consideration like taking care of your mental health and exploring ways to manage your well-being. This may not seem like something you need to worry about right now, but as a trial attorney, you may find your career to be extremely fast-paced and stressful at times.

As you become more entrenched in your soft skills coursework, it will become readily apparent why you must be adept in areas such as:

• Negotiation skills
• Time management skills
• Writing skills
• Enterprise management skills
• Presentation skills
• Research skills
• Critical thinking skills
• Core values review
• Creative thinking skills
• Professionalism
• Ethics

Many consider soft skills to be non-academic and more emotionally based, dealing with lighter topics; however, soft skills also bolster your critical thinking along with encouraging you to have positive interactions with other students, coworkers, and the public in general.

Are you interested in becoming a skilled legal writer and trial attorney? 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.