Successful in-house leaders need to be jacks of all trades with legal skills, business skills and, now, interpersonal ones, too. As legal department lawyers vie for more clout within the business, sources said that soft skills, not just traditional legal chops, have real importance.

The desire to build these skills sets was on display at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's annual institute last week in Las Vegas. At the conference, there were numerous sessions built around teaching soft skills such as public speaking and projecting confidence, as lawyers and legal ops professionals aim to develop these leadership abilities.

Cara Hale Alter, the founder and president of SpeechSkills, a communication training company,  led three well-attended sessions at last week's institute. She told Corporate Counsel that about half of the people she works with come from the legal field, and they're not just trial lawyers speaking in front of a courtroom.

“The greatest number of people I work with are not litigators,” Alter said. “They are the researchers and the in-house counsel out there. So I think there really is a fallacy that only the people who are public facing need to have this skill set and that's just simply not true.” 

In-house lawyers have the sometimes daunting task of convincing company leaders to follow legal advice they don't want to hear. When these cases arise, an in-house attorney's credibility can be a deciding factor in what happens next, she said.

“Gaining influence for lawyers, being compelling, being trustworthy, all these things are vital parts of the job,” she said. Alter's sessions at CLOC focused on how professionals in the legal field and beyond can project confidence with their posture and speaking skills—such as removing the word “um” from sentences—as well as how they can better read social situations. 

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Alter's first CLOC session focused on decoding gender dynamics in communication, followed by a session on how to tame adrenaline, especially in public speaking situations. At the session, she recounted putting herself in uncomfortable situations, like asking waiters to sing happy birthday to her at a restaurant (when it wasn't her birthday), to overcome her fears.

On the institute's final day, she held a two-hour plenary session on projecting confidence.

“It's about how to a carry yourself with leadership presence, how to project visible credibility,” she said. “It means the people you speak to immediately your value, your contribution, your expertise.”

Jeffrey Franke, assistant general counsel, legal operations at Yahoo Inc. and a member of CLOC's leadership team said the skills Alter teaches are also important for professionals on the legal ops side. It's often their job to convince the legal department, or company more broadly, to adopt new technologies and strategies.

It's easier to implement these innovations when legal ops has a credible reputation, which soft skills help to promote, he said.

“[These skills are] critical to persuasion, critical to driving successful implementations and critical to driving personal success,” he said. “We want people to know about them and think about them so they bring them into their own legal departments.”

In 2017, the first year that CLOC offered Alter's soft skill presentations at its institute, Franke said the more than 100-person session sold out within a day. This year's soft skills offerings were expanded to make these skills a much bigger part of the conference agenda.

The 2018 institute also offered sessions from Larry Richard, founder of management consulting firm LawyerBrain, which aims to help those in the legal industry get better people skills and improve leadership abilities.

“Legal ops teams need to know these tools exist. [There are] Myers Briggs [tests], speaking skills, key development skills, psychological profiles that they can leverage,” Franke said. “That's every bit as important as the individuals at the institute implementing technologies.”