What Makes a Good Lawyer (6 Qualities That Matter Most)

Most TC candidates can’t explain what makes a good lawyer beyond the obvious answers. And that’s a problem, because firms want to see you understand the qualities that set good lawyers apart.

During my 10 years as a commercial lawyer, I worked with many brilliant lawyers. And I’ve spent many years since coaching TC candidates on what makes a good lawyer and how to show it.

In this post, I’ll walk through the six qualities I’ve consistently seen separating the best lawyers from the rest, and that grad recruiters want to see evidence of in their future trainees.

So, let’s dive in.

1. Effective communication

Good lawyers are master communicators.

Communication encompasses written and verbal work, listening, and body language, and is more nuanced than most candidates think.

In practice, lawyers are communicating or preparing to communicate something most of the time. They pursue clarity ruthlessly and avoid ambiguity in everything they put out.

They also adapt their style to the different recipients they communicate with, so each one understands clearly.

The best lawyers I worked with were masters of plain English. They explained things accurately and in as few words as possible, which helped everyone they dealt with, from colleagues and clients to external parties and the other side’s lawyers. Clarity was always the goal, not length or complexity.

As an aspiring solicitor, your communication skills are vitally important and assessed throughout firms’ TC recruitment processes. What most candidates don’t appreciate, however, is how closely firms are scrutinising your current communication skills.

Firms will want to see you have a strong base to build on. They’ll look for evidence in your written applications and written exercises, in video and face-to-face interviews, and in group exercises.

They’ll also look at the experiences you’ve had to date, including any work experience, extracurricular activities, and academic activities such as presentations. Your job is to reflect deeply on all your experiences to identify the strongest evidence of your communication skills to put forward in applications and interviews.

And once you get to later-stage interviews and assessment centres, recruiters will be watching your listening skills closely too. Are you answering the exact question you’ve been asked, or a similar one you’ve prepared an answer for? Are you really listening to others in a group exercise, or are you too wrapped up in your own thoughts?

So, you should find as many ways to practise and improve your communication skills as you can.

2. Judgement

One of the main things clients pay lawyers for is their judgement.

Most solicitors can build the legal knowledge over time. But what sets the best apart is the ability to exercise sound judgement on the decisions that matter most for the client.

A lot of being a commercial lawyer is about showing good judgement when allocating, accepting or mitigating risk for the client. A lawyer who does this well can literally be worth millions of pounds to a business.

This might show up in the decision around whether to settle a dispute or push ahead into costly litigation. Or in deciding which risks are worth accepting as a necessary trade-off for the commercial upsides a client will get from a multi-million-pound merger or acquisition.

Being able to trust their lawyer’s judgement on difficult decisions like these is what clients value most.

In their training contract recruitment processes, firms look out for candidates who show good judgement. This can start in the application form when you explain what differentiates the firm from its competitors, or when you choose a recent news story to write about. It then continues through interviews, case studies, and written exercises.

And more and more firms are including situational judgement tests to assess your judgement in real-world situations that might arise for a trainee.

3. Commercial awareness

Commercial awareness is another core quality clients value in good lawyers.

The phrase is well-worn in TC recruitment circles, and it doesn’t really cut through to what true commercial awareness looks like in practice. At its core, it’s a way of thinking that brings the commercial context to the foreground when doing the legal work.

Great lawyers maintain deep, up-to-date knowledge of their clients’ businesses and the sectors in which they operate. They also have a broader understanding of the commercial and political landscapes. They hold all of that context in their heads and use it when advising clients, rather than giving legal advice in a vacuum.

In practice, this might mean structuring a deal to account for a sector trend, or mapping a regulatory change onto a client’s competitive position in the market. And clients will choose their lawyers based on how well they do this.

In the TC recruitment process, most candidates treat commercial awareness as another academic exercise, in which they seek to ‘learn’ about commercial stories and topics.

Whilst that’s part of it, it’s usually the way of thinking around them that most candidates need to develop more actively. That means engaging with the commercial stories at a deeper level, and thinking about how they fit into the wider business, economic, regulatory and political worlds.

One graduate recruiter once said she was looking for “commercial intrigue”, and I think that gets closer to what firms want to see. Can you show you’re intrigued by how these worlds connect and influence each other? Are you curious enough to reflect on current affairs and business matters for yourself, rather than treating them as academic material to memorise?

You’re not expected to know it all or spot every connection. But you do need to show you’re proactively seeking to understand more, and at a deeper level.

4. Analytical thinking

From what I saw across my 10 years in practice, analytical thinking is the quality that most distinguishes the best lawyers.

Analytical thinking covers a number of things:

• Interrogating facts and arguments rather than accepting them
• Spotting patterns and identifying what matters
• Breaking complex problems into manageable parts
• Stress-testing both your own reasoning and the other side’s
• Spotting where conclusions don’t actually follow from the facts

Good lawyers analyse information within an inch of its life.

They’ll read a 100-page contract and spot the one clause that poses a risk to their client. They’ll work through hundreds of thousands of documents and know which to dig into to serve the client’s best interests.

The advice a lawyer gives is only as good as the analysis that precedes it. Great lawyers have a thirst for interrogating information to uncover details that could help their clients.

As a TC candidate, firms will look for evidence of analytical thinking in your experiences to date when reading your application and listening to your interview responses.

They also use specific tests and exercises, such as the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Test, case studies, and written exercises. The latter two often include a collection of documents and information for you to analyse and use as the basis of an opinion, usually for a hypothetical client or senior colleague.

The candidates who impress are those who can analyse information thoroughly, spot issues and inconsistencies, and show strong critical thinking to turn it into something practical.

And it may surprise you to hear that firms aren’t necessarily looking for the ‘right’ answer each time. They just want to see strong, clear analytical thinking and reasoning.

5. Creative thinking

Lawyers aren’t typically seen as creative types from the outside. But the reality is good lawyers are very creative thinkers, not just technical legal specialists.

There’s much more creativity in the role of a lawyer than most aspiring solicitors realise. Every matter a lawyer works on for a client has its own unique set of facts, opportunities and challenges. Good lawyers recognise this and seek creative solutions for their clients that others haven’t considered yet.

Creative thinking for lawyers is often combined with analytical thinking. A good lawyer does both in parallel without being conscious of which state of mind they’re in at any given time.

Lawyers at leading commercial law firms often work with clients who are breaking new ground or facing issues that have never arisen before. For example, I saw this when assisting a senior lawyer at Sky Sports who structured creative first-of-a-kind deals for Sky TV to buy 10% stakes in four Premier League football clubs.

The more legal tech and AI develop, the more a lawyer’s creativity will matter. Legal tech will get better at delivering cookie-cutter legal solutions. Creative thinking will become more important when those solutions don’t fit the reality of a specific client, their situation, and the unique fact patterns.

Graduate recruiters will be on the lookout for creative thinking in TC candidates’ experiences. This can be as simple as when you came up with an idea for a spreadsheet to organise information during a work experience placement. Or it could be more sophisticated creative thinking around an entrepreneurial idea you’ve turned into a small business. Both are equally valid and good evidence of the sort of creativity a good lawyer needs.

There will also be opportunities to show creativity at an assessment centre, often via group exercises and case studies. The candidates who come up with their own ideas and articulate them (even if they’re not always right) are often the ones who stand out from the crowd.

6. Attention to detail

Attention to detail is a non-negotiable for a good lawyer.

TC candidates often think it’s important because a single word can change the meaning of something, to a client’s detriment. That’s true, but the need for attention to detail is far more pervasive than that.

In everything a lawyer does, they focus on detail. They’re forensic in their review of information and documents, and in their listening to clients, the other side’s lawyers, and anyone else involved in a matter. The best lawyers also have a well-developed instinct for which details matter most, and they’re often the ones who catch the details others miss.

Sometimes it might just be a typo that needs correcting to maintain high writing quality. Other times it might be a critical issue buried in a mountain of paperwork that presents a significant commercial risk in a multi-million-pound case.

Training contract applicants know how important attention to detail is, as they’re regularly advised to make sure their applications contain no spelling or grammar mistakes. Yet graduate recruiters have told me repeatedly that the most common reason they reject a candidate at the application stage is spelling and grammar mistakes.

Spell checks have been built into word processing software for years, and now we have AI that can proofread for mistakes too. There’s no excuse for errors nowadays. But it does take diligence and effort to avoid them completely. So, the good news is that if you work hard to do this, it will set you apart from much of the competition.

You also need attention to detail when reviewing things yourself without tech support. In case studies and written exercises, there will often be inconsistencies or small details that the grad recruiter will want you to spot. You may also need to write something at an assessment centre without spelling and grammar tools to fall back on, so your manual proofreading skills will still matter.

Attention to detail can feel like a chore or a bit nit-picky at times. But it’s one of the most important skills for a good lawyer, and you should be developing it now. The TC recruitment process offers many opportunities to practise.

And the likelihood is you won’t progress through certain stages if you can’t show you have it.

Other qualities that make a good lawyer

These six aren’t the only qualities that make a good lawyer.

I’ve focused on them because they’re the ones I most often saw separating the best lawyers from the rest, and the ones grad recruiters most want to see in their future trainees. Plenty of others matter too, and you’ll want to provide evidence of these through the TC recruitment stages – for example:

• Teamwork and leadership
• People skills and relationship building
• Resilience and perseverance
• Problem solving
• Negotiation and persuasion
• Adaptability
• Integrity

For a more detailed run-through of every skill a good lawyer needs, see my post on the 21 skills every aspiring solicitor should develop.

The more you understand what makes a good lawyer, the better you can reflect on your own experiences and present your strongest evidence of these qualities to a firm.

Have that as your goal, and you will progress through more recruitment stages with more firms.