Over the last 12 years of working with, interviewing, writing about, and learning from the brilliant minds of the legal world, I like to think I’ve internalized a thing or two. I am but a humble writer, but what’s wonderful about this role is the opportunity to connect with professionals from all corners of the industry—helping to tell their stories and share their insights with readers like you.
Suffice it to say that I’m continuously impressed by the creativity, innovative spirit, and book smarts of my colleagues in every corner of this space. Not to mention their willingness to teach and support others, which is a beautifully common quality in the folks I speak with week after week.
Thanks to those insights and that openness, as well as my own experience on the technology side of things, the legal space feels like home now. If you’re looking to jump into a career tackling legal data challenges for e-discovery, investigations, or other practice areas (and I highly recommend it!), here are a few things you should know as you develop the skills you’ll need to thrive.
#1: Technology chops will set you apart and keep you at the front of the pack.
Legal work is, at its core, an intellectual exercise in logic, philosophy, and strategy. Getting to the crux of a matter is all about discerning the story, uncovering the truth, and arguing one’s case accordingly.
But in today’s business landscape—where people overwhelmingly connect and share information with each other online rather than in person—a majority of communication happens in an electronic format. Which means that most of those stories you need to discover are hidden in massive digital libraries somewhere. Finding them requires not just a creative mind, but the legal technology that will help you dig through the noise and quickly home in on the critical details as you build your case or seek answers to your questions.
This means that an affinity for technology—its nuances and ideal application, its evolutionary trajectory, its best practices—is as important a skill set as case strategy and case law knowledge. There are teams of tech people to help you (more on that below!), so recognizing and leveraging their expertise is hugely helpful. But if you can get your hands around topics like artificial intelligence and its legal applications, the ethics of generative AI, and how different AI models support tasks like e-discovery and internal investigations—well, you’ll be sure to stand out in a crowd.
#2: Teamwork makes the dream work.
While building out your skills to encompass both legal insights and technology aptitude is an important way to differentiate yourself in many practice areas, it’s simply impossible for any one person to know or do everything. Drawing intelligent insights from legal data is always going to be a group effort.
For this reason, it’s essential to surround yourself with super-smart teammates and to collaborate with them effectively. If you’re an attorney or paralegal, getting to know your firm’s or organization’s project managers, IT experts, and litigation support staff is a great start. The reverse is equally true. You’ll need to work together to track down data, move it securely and efficiently across platforms, analyze it, interrogate it, produce it, and use it as evidence. Strong relationships between in-house and outside counsel and service providers are equally important.
Investing some time in team-building pursuits, getting to know your colleagues, and learning from one another is a fantastic way to ensure you’re all ready and willing to get through the next hairy deadline or messy together.
#3: Legal is a small-feel, connected community. Networking is key.
Another benefit of building good relationships within your team? You’ll start planting roots in the legal community at large.
As in most industries these days, legal professionals tend to move around from one organization to the next—perhaps because they want to move from a firm to in-house, or from practice to a service provider environment, or just to find some new challenges. Forging connections with coworkers will help you build a professional network that could define the future roadmap of your career.
Beyond your immediate colleagues, start networking in the legal industry—especially a niche like e-discovery—and you’ll quickly find that it’s a small world. Familiar names and faces often appear at events and in your feed, so connecting is easier than you think. Don’t be afraid to introduce yourself, get to talking, and (tactfully) make your interests and skills known. People are overwhelmingly friendly, ready to make new connections, teach, and learn from you.
It’s a good idea to make a positive impression even on the professionals making up opposing counsel’s case team: do your job well, be smart, advocate for your position strongly—but stay professional and respectful, too.
#4: There’s a time and a place for legalese—and it isn’t Slack.
Naturally, communicating well is an important skill for virtually any career. In legal, where a mingling of many minds is so necessary to complete each project, being mindful of your audience and platform is absolutely essential.
Whether you’re a lawyer, paralegal, technologist, review manager, analyst, forensic specialist, consultant, or anything in between, you’re brought onto a project team to contribute your unique expertise to the pursuit of a just, speedy, and inexpensive resolution. You likely know a lot that your teammates don’t, and that’s a good thing! But collaboration requires you to present that information in an accessible, effectual way.
This means speaking approachably, in lay language, when you’re hoping to teach a colleague about a data complication or legal constraint—and then bringing out the big words and scholarly citations when making your case as an expert witness or advocating for your client in an important motion or in court.
Thinking through how to present complex information to a layperson is going to help you forge stronger strategies and influence others more effectively; it can also help you learn that information more deeply for yourself via the protégé effect. So it’s a win all around.
Whatever your specialty is, being able to communicate a technical insight to your colleagues via emojis and GIFs in Slack is going to help you all reach the finish line of each project with confidence.
#5: Continuing education is crucial (even if it’s not a formal obligation for your role).
Lawyers are required to earn CLEs throughout the year to maintain their license to practice. This makes sense, of course, because the law itself is always evolving.
Likewise, technologists and project managers with many formal certifications are required to pursue ongoing learning to maintain those statuses as technology and techniques develop.
But even if you aren’t beholden to minimum requirements, it’s a fantastic idea to pursue frequent learning opportunities. Doing so is essential to maintaining awareness of the way the legal industry is evolving—because no year is exactly the same as the last.
Additionally, in the interest of collaboration and networking (as mentioned above), pursuing cross-functional education is always a smart plan. Dip your toes into the technological or legal side—whichever you’re less familiar with—to build a more well-rounded expertise, discover new interests, and meet new people. Creating a holistic viewpoint on issues of e-discovery and other practice areas can only help you do your job better.
Do you agree with these tips? What have we missed? Join the conversation on LinkedIn using #LegalThingsToKnow (and feel free to tag this author and/or Relativity to extend your reach!).
Sam Bock is a member of the marketing team at Relativity, and serves as editor of The Relativity Blog.
