Teaching How to Think Like a Lawyer: Seven Essential Legal Skills
For a long time, law was not a "taught profession". For example, in England, until the 1970s, there was no need to have a degree to become a lawyer. People were becoming lawyers as a result of a training contract (solicitors) or pupillage (barristers). The English system of legal education still requires a training contract or a pupillage before one can become a qualified lawyer. This is different from the United States and most other jurisdictions. However, what unites many jurisdictions is the growing gap between teaching law and practicing law.
In many jurisdictions, law degrees do not allow graduates to practice law successfully (on their own or even attempt to qualify as lawyers for regulatory reasons and because law graduates are, to a significant extent, detached from real-world practice. Conventional legal education often produces lawyers with theoretical knowledge about law and problem-solving capacity but have with weak skills to do actual legal work with clients. Large law firms both pay these recent graduates and charge their clients in accordance with their inputs (hourly rates) rather than their outputs. It is, therefore, not surprising that the high hourly rates of law firms have been criticized for effectively making clients subsidize the training of their junior lawyers.
The article begins by discussing the need to balance the taught and practical elements of legal education and various approaches to what it means to "think like a lawyer" and what makes legal education different from education in other areas. It then discusses the differences between various jurisdictions and the construction of a transnational legal profession. The rest of the article focuses on the analysis of a series of interviews conducted by the author with senior legal practitioners about essential legal skills and how to make teaching more relevant to the practice of law.
The article formulates seven essential legal skills based on conducted interviews which begin with focusing on the factual nuances that matter to effectively presenting client-centric solutions.
The article also makes specific recommendations on how to teach these legal skills, such as using real-life scenarios, involving practitioners more, introducing international and comparative law elements, and offering flexible online courses.
Also available at SSRN: Yarik Kryvoi, Teaching How to Think Like a Lawyer: Seven Essential Legal Skills (BIICL, 2025).
