The Skills Law Firms Can’t Afford to Ignore

The Human Skills of Transformation

In a recent conversation with Angela Luu, Head of Client Operations and Digital Adoption, we focused something that's getting far less airtime in the AI conversations than, which tool to choose or how to write better prompts: the human skills that actually determine whether any of this lands.  As Angela puts it "These aren't soft skills, they're human and right now, they matter more than ever."

Everything old is new again

These skills have always been there. Empathy, curiosity, thinking systemically about problems rather than just reacting to them, they have always been the markers of great teams. What AI has done is to really highlight the need for them.

"AI has really maximised or intensified the need for these skills," Angela says, "because expertise now is so valuable". The people who were always quietly doing things differently, designing better client communications, thinking about how to package their knowledge, building solutions rather than just billing for advice, are suddenly the people everyone is looking to hire.

The three skills worth talking about

Angela identifies three  human skills she keeps coming back to in her work, rolling out AI across large organisations.

The first is empathy, thinking about how people will feel about the work you are doing. This user-centric approach asks before you send that advice, that report, that training session, have you actually talked to the person receiving it? She shares a story about a two-page AI cheat sheet a colleague and her laboured over, cutting it down to the slickest, most concise version they could. A week later, one of the partners admitted she had never even opened the email. "They get so many emails about AI that they stop opening them." The lesson? Talk to the people you're designing for first, before you design.

The second is curiosity and there is an important distinction here. In reality, we're all curious about things we're interested in but this is about being intentionally curious about the things we find unfamiliar or threatening or perhaps a bit too technical.

The third is what Angela calls a build mindset. Lawyers are trained to diagnose problems yet a build mindset asks a different question: how do we stop this problem from happening in the first place? It's the shift from reactive advice to thinking about how expertise can be packaged, productised, and made more proactively useful to clients. "It's about learning from how other industries have done this," Angela says. "Lawyers can be quite sheltered in their ecosystem."

Why curiosity is harder than it sounds

Of the three, curiosity is an interesting one and the barrier to being curious isn't always a lack of interest, it's vulnerability.

Lawyers are trained to have answers and asking questions, especially in front of senior people, can feel like admitting a gap in knowledge. There isn't always room to say "I'm interested in finding out."

Angela heard this first hand when she ran a session for graduates anchored entirely around curiosity.  What came up was how much anxiety people have around asking questions at all. Would people think they were wasting time? Should they already know the answer? Are they showing their lack of knowledge?  That concern about being curious is real and it can often to follow people up the seniority ladder rather than fade away.

What does help is when leaders model curiosity. When a partner turns up to a training session with a notebook, genuinely there to learn alongside their team it can change the room. It's a small thing, but it speaks of something big: it's safe to be in learning mode here.

Leadership shapes everything

Yet none of this works without leadership engagement. The firms and teams Angela has seen make real progress are the ones where senior people are genuinely involved. Their presence or absence shapes whether anyone else feels safe to try.  "The real unlock is in the collaborative nature of AI," she says. "That requires all levels of seniority, not just the junior lawyers or the enthusiasts." If partners opt out, the whole workflow breaks down, and the potential of the technology stays out of reach.

Start small but start somewhere

If this all sounds like a lot, Angela's advice is simple. Just start with one habit;

Sign up to one newsletter and spend five minutes on it in the morning, ask one extra question in every meeting or before you send anything out, run it by one or two people in your audience.

These things really do add up and it becomes a domino effect. By building one of these habits, the others tend to follow, because they're all pointing in the same direction.

The technology and the tools will constantly change and keep evolving, but the human skills needed to make any of it work will remain constant. If you start there, the rest will follow.