If you ask most law graduates what makes a good lawyer, you'll hear a familiar script: know the law, get the grades, put in the hours. But if you've been practising for any length of time, you'll know the lawyers who really stand out rely on something well beyond legal knowledge and long hours.
We put that question to three people who think about this for a living: Sam Shosanya, General Manager of FrontTier, the College's leadership accelerator; Susan Pincus, National Careers Strategist at the College of Law; and Tatiana Rabaeva, Executive Director, Postgraduate Programs at the College of Law. Sam spends his days coaching legal leaders on how they show up; Susan spends hers helping graduates understand what actually gets them hired. Tatiana, meanwhile, designs the postgraduate programs that help practising lawyers progress throughout their career.
As Susan notes: "The profession has moved well beyond lawyers needing technical knowledge and intellectual intelligence alone."
We’ve distilled their insights into nine skills (across four themes) that every lawyer should be building, whether you’re two years PQE or twenty.
Thinking clearly: Judgement, Critical Thinking and AI Fluency
1. Judgement
Top of Sam's list is judgement.
"When you rely on your intuition, it's actually your subconscious reminding you that you've seen these patterns before," Sam explains. "It's the tool for dealing with ambiguity, dealing with risk, dealing with incomplete information."
His advice to leaders is simple: trust your gut. "It's not just about what's in front of you. It's about bringing context into your thinking and going, okay, with everything I know, what do I think makes the best sense here?"
Sound familiar? It probably should. You're likely doing this already, most days, without naming it.
2. Critical Thinking
Closely related is critical thinking, and this is where AI is upping the stakes for all of us. Indeed, Susan sees it as a defining shift for the profession: "Critical thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving skills are at the forefront," she says, "particularly given that the legal landscape is changing with a lot more complexity and uncertainty."
Sam agrees AI amplifies the issue. "AI is brilliant at turning out loads of information that looks accurate and meaningful, and lawyers have got to be really good at just unpicking what it offers," he says.
“AI is hallucinating cases that look and feel real,” says Sam. "We saw this in FrontTier’s AI Literacy course. AI can use all the right language, the right ways to cite cases, the right level of courts, inventing complete nonsense that follows correct case citation standards. That’s when you have to ask yourself, how do I evaluate this? Where's the evidence that supports this? How have you tested your sources? This is a key example of critical thinking."
3. AI Fluency
This brings us to AI fluency. Though if you think this just means knowing how to use the tools, Sam would push back.
"It's not just, ‘Can I use AI effectively?’ Part of using it effectively is actually knowing what it is," he explains. "It's designed to hallucinate because it's not allowed to fail to provide an answer. So, if it can't give you a real answer, it's going to give you any answer. Actually knowing that is really important in terms of trusting what comes out of it."
For Sam, real fluency goes deeper than knowing how to prompt a tool. "AI fluency is about developing the fundamentals of what AI is as technology, its potential and its limitations, that then inform how you identify what you use it for, when you use it, and where it's unsafe for use," he says. "Without that foundation in AI fluency, you haven't really mastered AI at all. You've simply used a tool."
Tatiana Rabaeva agrees the risk cuts both ways.
"The most important skill is a combination of legal expertise, advanced legal reasoning and judgement, and AI/digital competency," she says. "I'm a firm believer that as AI becomes more widely used in legal practice, there's a real risk of over-reliance on the technology. In fact, the more capable AI becomes, the more important it will be for lawyers to retain the skills necessary to critically supervise its use and independently verify its outputs."
Susan agrees the ground is shifting fast: as AI takes over more of the foundational work, traditional "legal research is becoming less important." However, AI hallucinations make it even more important that you question what AI research gives you.
And AI fluency isn't only about legal output. As Sam points out, it can be turned inward too.
"You can use AI quite effectively for introspection and self-improvement. I've seen people use it to upload a series of emails and say, tell me what you think is happening for me, tell me about my tone, tell me about my level of stress.”
Assuming you can take care of all the privacy and confidentiality issues, this can act as an early warning system for how you're actually coming across. "You might be using trigger terms. You might be using language that is confrontational as opposed to collaborative. You might be elevating the conversation instead of de-escalating," Sam continues.
Worth trying next time you're drafting a tense email.
The human edge: Connection, Relational Intelligence and Collaboration
4. Human Connection
So what can't AI do? For Sam, it comes down to human connection.
"People don't really care how much you know until they know how much you care," he says. "And AI is never going to be able to demonstrate how much it cares." Think about what you notice in a room that a machine never will: "It won't necessarily pick up body language in real time; it won't necessarily pick up cadence of language. If you're connected to someone, you can pick those things up and change the way you approach the person in the moment."
And let's be honest about what the job actually is, Sam says. "As much as lawyers may not want to like it, they are selling their services. There's always an element of know, like and trust — and you don't fix the know, like and trust without creating a human connection."
5. Relational Intelligence
Susan hears the same thing from employers. "Social skills, including emotional and relational intelligence — employers are seeking graduates who are strong communicators with the ability to engage in conversation and build relationships with clients, colleagues and peers."
These skills, she adds, "will add value beyond AI and technological tools."
That naturally extends to collaboration and networking — "the ability to collaborate, network, build relationships with clients based on the back of social skills."
Seeing the bigger picture: Business Awareness and Lifelong Learning
6. Business Awareness
You've probably known lawyers who are brilliant on the law but miss what the client actually needs. Both Sam and Susan flag this as a real gap.
Susan calls it business awareness. Employers, she says, "look for graduates who are well-rounded with life experience that enables them to be trusted advisors and see their clients' issues through a commercial lens, not only a legal perspective."
Sam sees the same issue. "Maybe a lawyer has assumed that what's most important to a client is that costs are mitigated, whereas the client's thinking is, ‘What I want is a faster result. I'll pay more for a faster result.’"
7. Lifelong Learning
The flip side of this is lifelong learning, and the humility that comes with it. Susan describes the graduates who stand out as lifelong learners as “curious – they ask questions to delve deeper with the intellectual humility to know they don't know it all. They can take on feedback, reflect, and learn."
Managing yourself: Protecting Time and Redefining Success
8. Protecting Time
Last but not least are two skills all about how you manage yourself.
Sam is deliberate about protecting time, and it starts with being honest about what actually matters to you. "To be really effective with your time, you have to be honest about what’s truly important to you – and orient your days around this." He's a firm believer in the Pareto principle: "20% of your efforts will account for 80% of your results. So, before you answer emails, before you pick up messages, you’re on to the 20%... because you're most in control of your day at the start of the day."
9. Redefining Success
Which leads to the final skill: redefining success. "Consider redefining what a successful day looks like for you. Because you’ve identified the 20% of your effort that is most important, once you’ve done your 20%, you can count that as a good day," Sam says.
And for Sam, this isn't just about productivity. It's really about values. "If you make time to live into your core values, you are almost, by definition, going to do a good job for your clients and customers."
Grades don’t define your success
As Susan notes, "many law graduates think a high-grade point average is the main criterion that makes them employable. Whilst strong grades are an advantage, they are never the sole basis of a recruitment decision. High grades do not show how well you talk to clients or solve messy problems. Knowing the law in theory is not the same as drafting a real contract or filing a court form."
Tatiana sees the same gap in how lawyers are trained.
"As AI increasingly takes on such tasks as retrieving, summarising and drafting information, I believe that it will be extremely important for lawyers to be able to continue to interrogate rather than simply generate legal work. How do you do this? By identifying what matters, evaluating competing arguments, recognising risk, and ultimately exercising sound professional judgement."
Tatiana continues, "Our subjects have been designed with practising lawyers in mind and will require critical analysis and application rather than simply recalling the knowledge, further developing expertise and professional judgement."
Knowing the law gets you started. Knowing yourself — your judgement, your values, and how you actually connect with the people you're meant to be serving — helps you develop skills that will last throughout your career.
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