 Lawyers are the coolest people you'll ever meet and not for the reason that you think. Keep watching to find out the soft skills that lawyers have that you can't pick up anywhere else. Hey it's Kyla Denango and there are soft skills that every lawyer obtains from being in law school graduating from law school and those are the things that we're going to talk about today. So becoming a lawyer means that you have studied the law or are practicing the law. Now you can also take it a step above and you can become a licensed attorney once you pass the bar. But even before that right scoot scoot scoot back into just graduating from law school and becoming a lawyer I truly believe that a law degree is a wonderful foundation for any job that you take for any career that you go into. Alright so the first one is leadership. Leadership is such an important role in any career that you have. So a lot of people say that when you go to law school you already have a type A personality which is said to be that you're an alpha or that you're a person who wants to stand up you want to be caught on you want the attention you want to dominate a conversation those types of things. Now that does not have to be the case for every law student. However law school does bring out a lot of the leadership skills that you will need to excel in your career right. So whether you decide to run for your student bar association president whether you get involved in a different law school extracurricular like a fraternity or a different kind of moot court any of those things law degree will benefit you and it will bring out leadership skills that you have that you can use when you're in the office right. Another thing where leadership is brought out in law school that you wouldn't quite think about is just that you decided to go to law school so you've already made a choice to be different to be separate to be other. You're graduating with a doctorate degree and I know some people who've graduated from law school and call themselves doctor whatever and that confidence that leadership that comes out is something that you get in law school something that you get when you become a lawyer and it's one of those soft skills that you really cannot downplay that you learned while you're in law school. So the second thing that I think is really important is management skills. So management can be anything from making sure that your law school loan money stretches out for the entire semester, lining up a course for the summertime, lining up a clerkship, caring for on-campus interviews or OCI's, attending those. So all of those things are management skills that are outside of you simply being a student and those management tasks are things that we often overlook when we're in law school but they are huge components of our life once we are out of law school. So I worked in a mid-sized law firm and I had to deal my time which is building your time in six minute increments for the whole day and that level of management of my day was not unusual to me because when I was in law school I had study blocks where I knew what I was doing at any time of the day right when I was dating somebody in law school and they're like what are you doing I never know what you're doing I'm like look at my schedule is right here between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. I'm working on contracts I'm either in the library or I'm so you know I mean so I knew what I was doing I was immediately learning how to manage my time and how to manage my resources when I was a law student and that has definitely served me after law school and being a lawyer. The next thing is flexibility. Law school teaches you to be flexible because we are graded on a curve in law school so a little bit of background information when you're in law school you have hypothetical questions and so you get to write out the different issues that are found what things you saw the rule of law that you saw write your analysis and your conclusion and as the professor is grading the exam they're marking four three two one you know whatever it was based on what issues you found and what happens when you're graded on a curve is that let's say 25 people are in that course and 25 people take the final exam the person who earns the highest grade sets the curve for the course and that makes you flexible and I know that doesn't seem like it's being flexible but it is because that's unlike the way that you're graded when you're an undergrad when I was an undergrad you know there was a standard score or maybe even there was a multiple-choice test so you knew if you got this many points right you would immediately get an A or B or whatever and that's just not the case in law school you could find out that you are the person who got the top grade in the course which is a Cali Award and if you're that person you just have the curve right so law school makes you flexible not only because of the way things are graded but because you have to learn a little bit of everything the professor could test you on the first thing that you learned when you started that course and they could test you on the last thing that they talked about before the exams so you have to be flexible you have to make sure I'm gonna know a little bit of this and this and this and this and this because I don't know what I'm gonna see and that flexibility is very strenuous on you when you're in law school but it makes you really flexible when you're outside of law school so the next thing is written and verbal communication skills law school is all about writing when you're a 1L student you're going to take a legal writing course you also will take a legal research course which will teach you all about the library and Westlaw and how to find cases and that writing that you start with takes you all through school as I just mentioned you will take those four-hour exams the hypothetical exams and you're just gonna be writing you're gonna be writing every single thing that your mind can think about for your Iraq which is issue rule analysis and conclusion and all of that it's just writing it's writing it's perfecting your writing it's clearing up your writing it's getting it better tweaking it all of that is gonna be writing and those written skills that you get out of law school are just unmatched and so I actually had to teach myself how to stop writing in such a formal way when I was out of law school when I started blogging and doing different things because you learn how to write in a very formal way your lover of Oxford comma I loved having two spaces behind every period because that was what I was telling law school and so there's a lot of formalities to being a lawyer being in law school and learning how to write and then your verbal communications are another skill that a lot of times people under estimate when they're in law school but law school teaches you how to advocate it teaches you how to stand up for yourself it teaches you how to stand up for other people to advocate is to publicly recommend or support and to publicly recommend or support is to put your weight behind it to say this is what's gonna happen this is what I believe in this is what I believe I read this is what I believe is important and when you're in law school you're learning how to do that for yourself you're learning how to do that for your clients you're learning how to do that for your classmates you're learning how to do that for everything else and it's one of the cool things about law school that you cannot forget it's one of those things that you can never let go of right so a lot of times that advocacy comes out when you're watching someone in a courtroom but also when I'm negotiating my rent when I'm negotiating a salary for a job when I am sending an email to a client to follow up all of those things are written in verbal communications that I learned in law school and their soft skills that serve me as a lawyer so the next one is work ethic work ethic is so important as a lawyer and it's one of those things that send in law school by the sheer demands that are made on your time there are so many things pulling at your attention so many things that are trying to grab you so many things for you to do and you got to find a way to get them done right when I went to law school at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge Louisiana about two weeks before school started I received an info packet for my textbook it also had cases that I needed to read and pages that I needed to read to prepare and then I got another packet about contracts course and it gave me a definition that I had to memorize before I got to class that day and before school officially starts it has started because you don't want to be sitting in that class and getting cold caught on and now you're stuck looking like a deer in the headlights with no response and you had two weeks to prepare so bam immediately you are thrown right into it and it's time to get to work so law school definitely improves your work ethic so the way that I say it is that lawyers are very good at doing 15 things and making it feel like we're doing five things and I have had to actually tell myself Kyla breathe you're allowed to do five things okay you're allowed to do eight things you do not have to do all this stuff and it's really hard to remember that and to find that balance because we are taught how to work at a very high level under very strict time constraints and get it done so the last thing that I think law school is really important at bringing out is the soft skill of teamwork and that initially to me when I wrote down the script I was like that's kind of anti I think that's not law school right like I'm a huge proponent of Southern University Law Center the Jaguars as a team yes we'll crush it every day I'm a really big proponent of the class of 2015 which is a class that I graduated in yes hundred percent will crush it so if you think about a team like that yes but teamwork falls right in line with the advocacy that lawyers learn how to do now when you think about typical teamwork like group assignments stuff like that I wouldn't say that's where law school brings out any teamwork but like I had study partners at every class that I took where we would meet hold each other accountable in the library get work done quiz each other so it definitely teaches teamwork in that skill but I did want to share some of the soft skills because I talked to lawyers every single week who either have pivoted into exciting career changes or have exciting interests and things that they're doing with their law degree and so it is really important to think about the soft skills that law school gives you that aren't necessarily things that you would pinpoint but they're really important things that are brought out of you when you become a lawyer okay so I hope you enjoyed this I hope you learned something new about the soft skills that every lawyer has coming out of law school let me know if you agree with the list if you have anything that I missed that should be added to the list and I will talk to you next time bye