How to demonstrate the key skills for law in applications

All solicitors’ firms and barristers’ chambers desire a specific set of skills from their trainees and pupils. This guide explains how to self-assess your skill set, demonstrate these key skills on application forms and focus on areas you need to improve.

Reading time: 12 minutes

All aspiring lawyers know that most law firms look to recruit high academic achievers. A good degree and strong A levels are therefore a given; they show that a candidate can process high volumes of information and find solutions to the kinds of problem that clients bring to their lawyers. A good academic record at university is also one of the ways through which a candidate may demonstrate the work ethic and discipline necessary to be a successful lawyer.

However, academic ability is just one of several important characteristics that graduate recruiters expect candidates to demonstrate in their applications. But while the way to do well in one’s studies is no secret, effectively demonstrating the other key skills that recruiters want to see evidence of in applications can be more difficult.

Below we set out the key skills candidates need to develop to secure a training contract, pupillage or place on a vacation scheme, as well as some pointers on how you might demonstrate these on application forms.

Communication – written and spoken

A lawyer’s primary job is to advise their clients on possible courses of action and help each client choose the best one. On matters such as large commercial transactions or litigation cases, complex law and multiple parties are also likely to be involved.

The ability to communicate clearly and persuasively when writing or speaking is therefore essential. Lawyers are often tasked with explaining complex legal concepts and actions to clients who aren’t lawyers and often these clients will be much more interested in finding out how to achieve their aims than the technical aspects of the law. And when members of a team of lawyers are each given a task that feeds into a wider transaction or other legal matter, clear communication between colleagues is crucial.

Having good interpersonal skills is also vital in a profession where people win and keep work through forming and maintaining strong relationships with clients.

How to demonstrate it

If you’ve worked in a customer-facing role or volunteered at a legal advice centre where you needed to both listen to and advise clients, as well as produce written documents, you should be talking about these experiences as evidence of your communication skills when you write an application.

Networking – the art of striking up conversations with people you don’t know – is another aspect of communicating that can give you a strong advantage in interviews.

Read this guide to networking for more tips or watch the video below.

Recruiters will get the strongest indication of your written communication skills through how well you put together your application form, CV and/or cover letter, while employers will get a first-hand sense of your spoken communication skills through interviews, your behaviour on vacation scheme placements and assessment centres.

Use LawCareers.Net’s tips to help you write the perfect cover letter, CV or application form.

Your applications, including your answers to the challenging questions that might be posed, need to be clear, concise and engaging. LCN has lots of in-depth advice on writing applications, but if you aren’t used to the formal style demanded in these sorts of applications you should also brush up on these stylistic and grammatical tips.

And once you’re successful at the application form stage, read this information on how to prepare for a video interview.

Teamwork and leadership

The ability to work well with others is fundamental for lawyers. Solicitors work in teams within their firms as well as with their clients, while many also work closely with lawyers in other jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, barristers are often characterised as lone wolves. Although they spend a lot of time researching and preparing submissions on their own, barristers also need strong working relationships with their clerks. Major criminal cases or commercial disputes regularly see teams of barristers assembled, as the work is just too much for one advocate.

Throughout the application and interview process, you’ll be assessed on your ability to fit into a team dynamic and pull in the same direction as your potential colleagues. This doesn’t mean that you must like everyone you come across, but it does mean that you need to work professionally alongside many kinds of people, some of whom might not have much in common with you.

Read our 10 tips for training contract interviews in this LCN Says.

Your ability to take the initiative and lead the way will also be considered, but you should be careful – you don’t want to cross the line between providing ideas and organisation and being overbearing and unwilling to listen to others. As someone seeking a training contract, pupillage or work experience, coming across like Napoleon isn’t a good idea. At this stage, it’s more important to show that you’re a good team player but are also capable of acting with initiative and leadership when necessary.

How to demonstrate it

In terms of extracurricular activities and work experience, the obvious one is to be a member of a sports team. But there are lots of other activities that you can do that involve collaborating closely with others, such as playing in an orchestra, editing a student newspaper, being a member of a debating team, participating in a play or other drama project, being part of a dance group, getting involved in student union politics, working with others on an academic project or presentation – the list goes on.

This also includes any jobs you might have had. The same goes for leadership – think about any time that you’ve taken the initiative, thought of a unique solution, or done the organisational legwork to get your colleagues, friends or teammates on the right track.

Accuracy and attention to detail

As a solicitor or barrister, you’ll be working with clients and other lawyers on matters where the stakes are high – whether it’s a high-value M&A transaction or a child custody case, there won’t be room for confusion or error. With expectant clients and partners waiting on your contributions and tight deadlines overhanging it all, you don’t want to miss something or make a silly mistake.

Read more about working in M&A via this Practice Area Profile.

Subsequently, meticulous attention to detail is an important skill to cultivate – you must consider every aspect and implication of a given task and make sure that there are no spelling errors or unclear phrasing in any document you’re tasked to handle. And if you’re dealing with numbers, they need to be checked and double-checked to prevent any errors.

How to demonstrate it

Look back through your previous work experiences, extracurricular activities and academic work. If you volunteered at a legal advice centre, charity or similar, you’d likely have had to follow specific procedures in carrying out your work – the same will be true in a law firm.

Have you ever been required to proofread documents, input data or create graphs or tables? If you’ve worked in a business, you might have conducted an inventory check or stock take. All such tasks require attention to detail and make for great examples to present in applications.

Deadlines and competing priorities also require good time management skills, so think about when you’ve multitasked or had to split your time and attention between different tasks. The simple fact of being a student while working a part-time job can be used as a great example of multi-tasking and prioritising workload if explained well.

Commercial awareness

Above all, lawyers are trusted advisers to their clients. There’s much more to being a good lawyer than knowing how the law works – you must be able to apply that knowledge to your client’s circumstances and recommend a practical solution to the matter, while also anticipating any potential stumbling blocks and setting out ways to get around them. For the many practitioners who serve business clients, this means that knowing all about a given client’s business and the wider sector in which it operates is essential.

A commercially aware solicitor also appreciates how their firm works as a business. Firms must pay attention to their bottom lines in the same way as other businesses, while different firms may focus on different areas of law as their main strengths. Issues such as turnover, or a desire for strength in a certain area of law or location may drive firms to merge, pursue a lateral hire or open a new office.

Firms depend on solicitors being able to win work based on forming and maintaining strong relationships with clients. When you write an application or attend an interview, you’ll be expected to show potential in both aspects of commercial awareness – the ability to find solutions for clients based on understanding their businesses inside out and understanding how your chosen law firm works.

How to demonstrate it

Training programme or pupillage applicants aren’t expected to be ready-made economic experts. A nuanced understanding of a firm’s clients will come with experience, but you should be able to demonstrate the basic engagement with the wider world that shows you have common sense and can keep up with important news stories and developments.

It's not necessary to read the Financial Times every day to learn about the business world, but you should follow the news from the worlds of business and politics and be able to express a reasonably informed opinion on big issues such as Brexit, workplace sustainability or AI in the legal sector. At this stage, it’s all about showing that you’re engaged (which is best demonstrated by having some conversational knowledge of current affairs) and have the ability to think critically about complex arguments.

Use LCN’s Commercial awareness hub, sponsored by Mayer Brown International LLP, which has links to articles, videos and podcasts geared toward developing your commercial awareness. Make sure you read the Commercial Question section, where lawyers examine various commercial issues from a legal perspective each week, keep up to date with on the news with our commercial news round-up, and tune in to our monthly Commercial Connect newsletter and podcast available on all good streaming services.

And for a rundown of great commercial awareness sources outside LawCareers.Net, read this guide to building commercial awareness.

For entry-level applicants, understanding how a law firm works as a business is a matter of research. You should read up on your chosen firm extensively before applying. What are its main practice areas? Where are its offices? Does the firm have an alternative business structure licence? If so, should it be worried about the rise of alternative legal service provider accountancy firms? Has it been involved in a merger recently? What do the recent news stories and press releases on the firm’s website focus on? Find out this information and use it to tailor your application to the specific firm in question.

What does understanding a law firm as a business involve? Read this Oracle for our tips.

Drive and determination

Every recruiter knows how competitive the legal profession is for those looking to enter it, as well as the often difficult work and long hours that characterise the careers of many lawyers. Motivation is therefore an essential quality for candidates with law firms and chambers wanting to recruit people who they can trust will get the work done to the highest standard and meet deadlines.

How to demonstrate it

Drive can be a nebulous characteristic to pinpoint but ultimately a driven person is identifiable through their work experience and employment history, or through the pursuit of extracurricular activities. Juggling a job through your A levels and degree can be a great example of determination, but it’s not all about legal work experience. We’ve heard of partners who were impressed by candidates who undertook a paper round for three hours every morning before school, or those who’ve worked in retail and worked their way up the ladder.

Use The Oracle to find out how to get work experience in your first year.

Equally, sustained commitment to an extracurricular pursuit is great to highlight when applying. Recruiters would rather see that somebody has committed themselves to one or two activities throughout sixth form, university or working life, rather than someone who’s signed up half-heartedly to everything going. A good example could be playing a musical instrument to a high level or joining a university society in your first year and working your way up to become a part of the committee, and having the motivation to help improve the society in your second or third year.

Another example of resilience and determination could be highlighting how you haven’t given up after receiving a job rejection or being unsuccessful in a recruitment process at a firm. Explaining how you took the feedback and worked on your skills and experiences to improve your future applications could be an effective way of showing recruiters that you’re dedicated to pursuing this career and won’t give up easily.

Evidence: show, don’t tell

Showing recruiters that you have the skills needed to be a good lawyer should always involve looking back through your past experiences for evidence. Every skill you might have developed in a previous job or during an extracurricular activity (eg, perfect punctuality, a good telephone manner or an ability to defuse an emotional situation) is something that recruiters want to know about, as long as you can show evidence of that skill by referring back to your experiences in a concise and articulate way.

If you’re having trouble remembering everything, think carefully about all the responsibilities and tasks that, for example, a previous job involved, and write them down. Then think about the skills that you used to do that job. And if you identify a skill in which you don’t have much experience, that’s just part of the process because you’ll then know about this area of potential weakness and can do something about it.

Learn more about the key skills you need to demonstrate in your applications.

Trust the process

Imagine your experiences as a group of ingredients you can pick and choose from when baking a cake. When required to demonstrate a skill, think which ingredient would illustrate this best, and add a pinch to the application form. Ideally, your finished application form will be like a well-risen and well-balanced delicious cake!

Olivia Partridge (she/her) is the content manager at LawCareers.Net.