Principal law clerk skills for your resume and career

Law school graduates should focus on developing client interaction skills and dispute resolution skills, including active listening, understanding emotional intelligence, and non-defensive communication. The need for low-cost legal assistance, particularly in large urban areas, in foreclosure, eviction, unemployment, and bankruptcy will be significant. Volunteers with legal training will be needed to address unprecedented impacts on individuals in many areas of the law. They could also work on the software or technological skills that law school may not have provided but which will make them even more attractive to employers after the pandemic.

For global affairs careers, many skill sets are sought. Language skills are valuable. All job seekers need basic computer skills. Word processing, spreadsheet and data analysis, excellent writing and communication skills are sought. Aside from these basic skills, the range of skills employers seek becomes more specialized. Computer mapping skills and the ability to analyze political, economic, social, and environmental issues with depth are sought. By numbers of jobs, the private sector is larger than the government sector. The understanding of how business and international trade works is useful.

Legal employers are seeking young lawyers with a good academic grasp of the law, excellent legal research and writing skills, advocacy abilities including negotiation, trial, and appellate exposure, and personal attributes of integrity, teamwork, diligence, resilience, and an expectation of success.

Two soft skills come to mind immediately: kindness and self-restraint. I have noticed that this generation of new attorneys is less accustomed to taking conflict in stride. What I mean is that in a social media world, one can overreact without facing the other person or simply walk away without responding to a text or post that seems confrontational or disrespectful. In person, there is usually no way to walk away without making the situation worse, so we get better and better at figuring out how to respond with kindness, humor, and patience. That is an excellent skill to have with clients who naturally feel stressed, or with overworked or overzealous opposing counsel or judges.

As to self-restraint, many ethics violations occur among attorneys who feel overwhelmed by their workload. Law school is the best place to learn how to figure out how to manage one's time, and to learn self-restraint -- i.e., when to stop and move on to the next task. This quality of self-restraint will not only help to make sure that new attorneys are reliable on behalf of their clients, but that they are happy with their job for the long-haul. There will always be more clients, but an attorney who knows their limits, but still gets the job done, will be glad to be an attorney throughout their career.