The Basic Skillset of a Lawyer
Marketing, business development, making Tik Tok videos, getting featured or profiled here and there, and such matters are things one does purportedly for attracting legal work. These are not skills for producing high-quality legal work. They are an enervating distraction, especially to the development of a young lawyer’s legal abilities. For myself, there are 4 basic skill sets every lawyer must possess: the ability to read, write, speak and think. I know anyone literate can do these things as many do. But a lawyer ought to have so developed, polished and refined each of these skills that they perform these abilities to a far higher level and quality than the common man with the benefit of knowledge of the law and its practice. An analogy I draw is with the sport of golf. You and I can hit a golf ball. Our clubs connect with the ball. But the ball doesn’t go where we want it to. Often it finds the worse place to end up. We lack precision and consistency with our swing. We mistime it. We misgauge the distance. We duff our shots. We misread the greens. All the expensive equipment in the world couldn’t make us a better player. We realize the meagreness of our ability when we compare ourselves with a professional golf player. We marvel at the sheer control, accuracy and confidence in which they perform. The pro does not look for an area to hit, he has picked out a spot. We have a margin error of 50 meters; the pros play to a margin of 5 feet. We aim to get it anywhere in the green (janji sampai); the pros are working out where to place it on the green to set themselves up for the next shot. We and the pros are playing golf but to very different degrees such that they are almost different games. The level a common golf pro plays to is several magnitudes greater than your average social club player like me. That should be the gulf in which a lawyer differs from the common man in our ability to read, write, speak and think: several orders of magnitude greater. If we, as lawyers, cannot do this then we offer no value to our services save for the ability to regurgitate the law, which any law student can do. The first skill I want to discuss is reading. Reading is the ability to absorb written information. Firstly, not many like to read these days and even less read. A rare few make it a point to do so. And this regrettably includes lawyers. The less we read, the less we absorb. Reading transports us from a state of ignorance into an informed state. Secondly, when I say just read, I do not simply just mean scanning a page and allowing the words to pass before our eyes. When I say read, I mean engaging with our reading material with awareness, nuance, empathy, sensitivity and honesty whilst bringing to bear the full brunt of our experience, knowledge, discernment and learning. I mean critically reflecting on what we read. I mean actually being focused on the material instead of being concerned about how we look at reading in a public area. I mean reading widely and diversely; read every day; read everything and anything. Read up on your area of law. Then those out of it. Then those around it. Read foreign judgments. Read academic articles. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read labels, news, obituaries, epistles, and poetry. Read utter trash. Read the sacred. Everything in between. All of that will build your vicarious experience of life. It builds up your store of human life experience and human behaviour patterns from which we can draw upon when dealing with others. Reading improves the next skill I want to discuss: writing. Lawyering and language are intimately connected because a lawyer’s role is about communicating. Writing relates to the ability to express ourselves textually. It is a separate and independent skill from reading. Writing is important because, as lawyers, we will have to inevitably produce something textual – an affidavit, a sale and purchase agreement, a statement of claim, formal correspondence, memorandums, etc. and we have to do it often. As a lawyer, it is not enough to simply write. Since we have to write at a high level, our writing should be clear, engaging, meaningful, efficient and persuasive. The better we write, the more we are read, the more we are read, the more persuasive we can be. Poor writing is pretentious, pompous, ambiguous, confusing and dishonest. Poor writing puts people off. It enervates the reader. It makes difficult what should be easy. Above all, it is a waste of time. In order to write well, like reading, we have to do it often. Ideally, we should do it every day. A great way to start or keep the momentum is by journaling. Even writing for just 10 minutes a day is helpful and healthy. Write for a reason. Write for no reason. For the hell of it. Mimic writers you like. Steal from those you love. Type out their words. Write what you like. Write about what you don’t like. Word by word, phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, our writing abilities will develop and hopefully, eventually coalesce. But simply reading will not make us better writers. We must engage in the act itself. Writing well is not a widespread skill in Malaysia. Poor writing is common among the majority of lawyers, judges and judicial officers. Many write stilted, formalized, routinized, pompous prose peppered with cliched phrases or formats. Just because we are right, does not mean we well write. Speaking relates to the ability to express ourselves verbally. It is closely linked to writing because it relates to the expression of our thoughts or feelings. The difference in medium means that speaking is also separate and independent from writing or reading, although intimately connected. If we read or write
