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“Soft Skills” Now A “Hard” Requirement For Law Practice But Law Schools Are Not Teaching Them
As generative artificial intelligence replaces more of the grunt work in law practice, the skills lawyers need are radically shifting. According to a 2026 BARBRI-sponsored survey of more than 300 law students, associates, partners, and law firm staff, the profession is converging on an uncomfortable truth: oral communication skills, emotional intelligence, collaboration, networking, and other “soft skills” are now essential to career advancement — and law schools aren’t doing enough to teach them.
GAI Has Increased The Value Of Human Skills
The vast majority of law students and associates surveyed — 77% of law students, 75% of associates, and 58% of partners — now believe GAI has made soft skills more important for success in law practice. As GAI absorbs more of the research, drafting, and analysis that previously defined junior lawyering, the human judgment, relationship-building, and oral communication skills that GAI can’t replicate are becoming the real differentiators.
Law Schools Teach Students to Think Like Lawyers But Not How to Talk Like One
Legal education excels at teaching students to think like lawyers, but has a glaring blind spot: teaching students to talk like lawyers.
Talk isn’t just a “soft skill” — it’s a powerful catalyst that drives reading comprehension, sharpens writing, and prepares students for the profession they’re entering. And legal education has been structurally undermining it.
Law schools teach students to think like lawyers, but not to speak like them
Despite being an essential professional skill, oral communication gets little to no structural support in legal education. Faculty teach through class discussion and Socratic questioning, but oral communication is rarely taught, valued, or assessed as a distinct skill. Worse, some faculty actively restrict students from talking about their research and writing with peers. But silence speaks volumes: it cuts students off from developing their professional identity and delays their entry into the legal discourse community, hitting first-generation college and law students the hardest.
Start law school with exams in mind
Yes, you read that right. Brand new 1L’s starting law school in August should immediately think about exams taking place in December. 2L’s & 3L’s are nodding their heads right now because they know I’m right. And, I have the data to prove it.
1L Orientation starts soon and can be an overwhelming information overload. Most law school orientations teach basics like IRAC, reading and briefing cases, and outlining to prepare students for the first few weeks of law school.
Too many 1L’s mistake the advice on reading and briefing cases and outlining as the only steps necessary for getting “good” grades in law school and budget their time per day or week based on how many pages in a casebook they have to read and brief. Spoiler alert: over the course of a term, you will read 100’s of cases. For each subject.
Reading and briefing cases is the barest of bare minimums. Put simply: Reading and briefing cases is studying, but is NOT learning.
Retrieval practice protects against stress
Stress, especially high stress testing like the LSAT, law school exams, and the bar exam, impairs our memory and decreases our performance. Some law students with text anxiety “blank out” during exams due to acute stress and cannot remember anything they learned. What if you could make your memory and all of the material that you learned immune to stress?
Learning by using retrieval practice and self-testing makes your memory more “stress resistant” than if you learn by rereading or memorization. Retrieval practice – recalling information from memory without any cues and taking practice tests – is a learning super tool, much more effective than restudying or rereading. Researchers have already proven that retrieval practice is better for learning than rereading because it builds knowledge and calibrates learning by helping learners understand what they do and do not know.
Now, researchers have now proven that retrieval practice also protects what we have learned against acute stress.
“[U]sing a highly effective learning strategy to strengthen memory at encoding inoculated memory against the deleterious effects of the delayed stress response.”
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