David Mellor famously said of lawyers: "Lawyers are like rhinoceroses – thick-skinned, short-sighted and always ready to charge."

Whether you agree with this rather unflattering assessment of the legal profession, there is perhaps one thing that rings true from this analysis – lawyers operate in a tough, competitive and cut-throat environment where they need to be thick-skinned business people in order to succeed.

But succeeding in the legal business is not just about being excellent and robust lawyers; it is about leadership and leading teams effectively, while delivering a first-class service to clients. The structure of a legal partnership means that the partners run and manage the firm's business. Are partners made up because they are good managers? No, it is usually because they win business and are good lawyers. Lawyers (no matter how competent they may be) are not, on the whole, instinctively good managers and leaders and this is where they fall down. Training in the area of leadership and management and improving 'soft skills' can go a very long way to improving performance in this area, which has a significant knock-on effect on profitability.

In spite of this relatively common shortcoming within the legal profession, investment in soft skills training is often ignored. On the face of it, this is understandable given the necessity to concentrate upon the hard legal skills, which are a prerequisite in order to excel in what is a highly technical and analytical field. When running a law firm, success is so often measured in bringing in high-profile work and the substantial fee income that this work generates. This is obviously a large and essential ingredient of any successfully run and profitable commercial law firm. However, profits can be hugely increased if investment is made in improving and recognising the less tangible contributions of fee earning staff, such as their ability to manage and incentivise diverse teams successfully.

Soft skills defined

Not likely to be found on many CVs, yet essential ingredients for commercial success, soft skills are essentially the skills of relationship management or, put more simply, those social skills, personal values, or interpersonal skills, which enable an individual to get along with others.

These include being empathetic with those in our teams, being able to manage conflict, to cope with the shortcomings of others and finding a way around complex interpersonal problems. In the context of a law firm, it could be relatively simple issues such as learning to delegate efficiently and effectively; supervising properly and giving constructive feedback and handling awkward conversations rather than avoiding an issue and increasing its likelihood of 'imploding' later.

These skills are not necessarily intuitive and thus investing in them using bespoke methods moulded to a firm's culture can go a long way to improving the cohesiveness of fee earning teams, which in turn would have a positive effect on improving client service and productivity. It goes without saying
that this will have a big impact on the bottom line.

The single biggest overhead in any law firm is staff remuneration and, in order to protect and maximise that, huge investment soft skills training at all levels is essential. There are the more obvious short-term gains such as improving staff morale and retention. However, this investment will also ensure effective succession planning in the medium term; there are undoubtedly financial repercussions if you are forced to bring in expensive lateral hire partners rather than having the pick of your home-grown talent.

Additionally, the effect that properly targeted soft skills training has upon the productivity of fee earning staff and the delivery of a better client service cannot be underestimated. Teams that work together and capitalise on their individual members' diversity rather than allowing those differences to get in the way are undoubtedly more successful. This training also helps you get the best out of those employees who, despite being able lawyers, can let down themselves down by their inappropriate comments in client meetings.

On top of this, we are living in increasingly litigious times where we are seeing more and more discrimination claims being brought against law firms. Lawyers who have received training in soft skills and leadership are far less likely to find themselves in a position where they could be exposed to a claim or time-intensive personnel issues. Hence there is a very real risk management advantage in investing in the soft skills training of your staff.

In an uncertain economic climate, training budgets are often the first thing to be reduced or placed on the back burner. But it is at times like these that you should perhaps protect your single biggest investment – your people – not least because this is likely to give you a substantial edge over your competitors who are competing for ever-decreasing business in a flat market.

We are used by law firms due to the fact that we offer a wide range of bespoke soft skills/management training specifically tailored to what they want. We also provide research, development and facilitation by experts in the field of diversity and management, some of whom are lawyers with first-hand experience of the specific management problems and commercial pressures facing law firms.

Our experience in the diversity arena is built into our training. We seek to subtly alter delegates' in-built prejudices and attitudes by getting them to look at their colleagues from a different perspective, so that, for example, the question asked when a new person joins a team is not "will they fit in?" but "what value can they add?". This can have a very positive effect in shaping a firm's culture to be an inclusive and productive one rather than, which is so often the case, an exclusive and cliqued one which can result in a disjointed firm made up of competing sub-cultures.

Our approach is a 'psycho-legal' one. This blends compliance and responsibility (the hard stuff) with understanding and empathy (the soft stuff), primarily to promote productivity and excellence.

Sasha Scott is managing director of Inclusive Diversity.