Top Traits of a Great Lawyer
When you finish law school, you’re chomping at the bit to get started in your own cases. You want to fight for those who’ve been wronged and make those wrongdoers pay for their sins. However, getting customers to your practice requires that you have the following traits described in detail below.
Being able to successfully communicate with your clients is a must. There’s nothing worse than asking for someone’s help and they respond by simply ignoring your wishes. You should be able to spend quality time with your clients and answer all of their questions. Be sure to realize that lawyers tend to speak in legal jargon, but clients don’t. You should break everything down to make it simple for your clients to fully understand. The more your clients understand the process, the more they’re going to trust you and your judgment.
Not everything is black and white in the eyes of the law or your client. In fact, most cases are going to reside somewhere in the gray zone. This will require you to be creative with your problem-solving. You want to find solutions that will make your clients happy and fly in court. Being able to be creative with your solutions is a big plus as you can create many win-win situations that bring all parties out on top.
We can’t mention this list of traits without bringing up organization. It doesn’t matter how good you are at practicing the law or talking with clients, if you can’t stay organized, you’re not going to be very successful. There are many tools out there which can help you to be more organized such as will and estate software. These programs can make easy to fill in templates that will require the least amount of work on your part. These software programs can allow your firm to create processes so that you can ensure all paperwork is covered and you’re spending your valuable time wisely.
One commonly overlooked trait of the best lawyers out there is perseverance. In the world of instant gratification that we live in, there’s a real lack in the ability of perseverance. As a great lawyer, you need to be able to decide on a path to take and stick with it until the end. Lawyers that are easy to jump ship and advise of settlements or simply stopping cases are not going to have very many clients. You need to be able to make a decision and work at it until the end. You must have that fighting attitude throughout the entire process. With legal proceedings and paperwork processing, cases can take months, if not years to complete. Only the best are able to stay concentrated on their end result after months of going at it.
Being a great lawyer should be a goal of every new law student. You want to bring in clients that trust your judgment and feel comfortable working with you for all of their legal needs. The above are some of the most important traits that you’ll need to develop if you want to shine in your industry.