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Necessary Skills and Traits for Communications Professionals

  • Written by NewsServices.com


Finding the right personnel for a law firm is crucially important, and it’s not just about the lawyers. Communications teams for law firms also have to be carefully picked to ensure that the firm gets the right mixture of skills that will benefit their work and strengthen their organisation.

But how do we know what these skills are? Below are some of the most important skills for any communications professional to have, but are perhaps doubly important for law firms:

1. Articulate and Confident Speaking Skills

Communications professionals have to create understandable messages for both internal and external consumption. In a law firm, the messages that need to be communicated are often quite complex, but still need to be conveyed in a way that everyone can understand. To manage this task, every member of a law firm communications team has to be on top of their game when it comes to articulating their thoughts in spoken word.

Speaking skills are particularly important for internal communication, since most external communication is done in written forms. However, even that is changing with the increasing importance of video-based media. Any communications professional that can’t efficiently and effectively communicate key ideas verbally is not worth their salt!

2. Strong Writing Skills

One might argue that strong writing skills are even more important in communications than spoken ones. Written communication still dominates much of the work done by these team members: emails, letters, website and social media content, press releases and so on. These professionals need to be able to adapt their writing to suit their target audience but without losing the potency and gravity of the main message, and that’s a serious challenge in a law firm.

3. Empathy

When you work in communications, you have to be able to get into the minds of others and understand the particular ways in which they think about things. That takes a strong degree of empathy.

From a law firm’s perspective, the communications team has to get into the minds of clients and understand how they’ll think and feel when they see a particular email or other communication from the firm. The language has to be understandable, but also reasonable and logical while still carrying the right tone. With no empathy, how can you be sure you’re achieving that?

4. A Positive and Can-Do Attitude

Lots of tasks in the world of legal practice can seem impossible to do. From creating an engaging and appealing web platform that even ordinary people will find interesting to read to managing the communication of serious matters to media, clients and other stakeholders. The scale of the task can appear overwhelming, and therefore is aided by the maintenance of a positive, can-do attitude. There can be no nay-sayers in the communications team.

5. Creative Problem-Solving

Virtually no two problems that a communications team encounters are completely the same, and the chances of that being the case in a law firm are even higher. Even when the same types of cases are being handled, every family and individual’s situation is different. To deal with communications hiccups, then, requires a strong degree of creative problem-solving capability.

6. Knowledge of Best Communications Channels

Finally, different types of business will make use of different channels to communicate with their target audience. While a platform like Instagram boasts some 1.4 billion users around the world, it’s not necessarily the place people look for announcements from law firms, for instance. Each business type needs to focus its resources on channels that will be effective and make a positive contribution to the overall communications strategy.



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