How To Communicate Better As A Lawyer
4 essential communication skills for modern lawyers.
Contents
One of the most important skills for any professional is the ability to communicate effectively.
And this is even more true for lawyers looking at nuanced problems where there is very rarely a binary yes or no, right or wrong, answer.
One of the best ways to stand out as a lawyer is to be a really good communicator. Along with commercial awareness and technical excellence, it’s one of the three core skills that we consider make up the best lawyers.
When you communicate well, your clients and all of the other lawyers you work for internally will love you.
They won’t have to read your email five times to understand it or ask you follow-up questions to get the information they need.
They’ll be left satisfied and confident with the information you’ve given them and they will like working with you. The likeability bit is priceless.
We know this because we've been on both sides of the equation: advising clients as practising lawyers in City law firms, and receiving advice from external counsel as clients ourselves.
What does it mean to be a good communicator as a lawyer?
Put simply, it's about conveying your message - whether in person, over the phone or in an email - in a manner that’s clear (that’s easy to understand and jargon free), precise (each word is used with purpose) and to the point (no waffle).
Think about it: we’re lawyers, precision is the name of the game.
Our job is to remove ambiguity as best as we can. Ambiguity means uncertainty, and uncertainty means risk. We are in the risk reduction game and clients pay us handsomely to do that for them.
So we must make things as easy as possible for our clients and colleagues by giving them the information they need as clearly as possible.
This guide will look at four key overarching principles for expert communication.
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Simpler is always better
Modern legal professionals do not use fancy words, long sentences and archaic language and neither should you. We can’t stress this enough.
Simpler is better. Write simply, speak simply.
Use ordinary words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
Avoid unnecessarily intellectual words. If the meaning of a word isn’t widely understood, if you need to double check its meaning from an online dictionary, do not use it.
Whenever you’re putting something together, ask yourself: how can I express this using as few words as possible?
Simple writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply the reader will engage with it.
Simply put, it requires less energy from the reader to consume it and no one in the history of the world has ever said they wished something was harder to read.
So live by George Orwell’s rules for writing:
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
If you take one thing away from this guide, let it be that simpler communication isn't just a style preference - it's a strategic advantage.
Clients and colleagues will respect and respond to clarity.
Simplicity isn't for ease - it's for impact.
Whenever you present your work, start with the answer
No matter what you think of the big consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain, they’re really good at coming up with models and frameworks to help businesses solve problems and operate more efficiently.
One of our all-time favourites is the ‘Pyramid Principle’ - also known as the ‘top-down communication’ style.
It’s widely used in the consulting world and all it is is a simple framework to help you communicate better, or in the words of Barbara Minto - the McKinsey consultant who came up with it - “to help you find out what you think”.
You can think of it as a way to make more persuasive arguments by structuring your communication in a way that focuses on the key message that you want your audience to take away.
Fundamentally, it observes the golden rule of communication in a professional context: get to the point. Your clients and colleagues don’t want to be entertained, they want to get things done.
It’s best used whenever you’re communicating the findings of a task or problem you’ve been given.
Here’s how it works. There are 3 steps:
- Start with the answer: Begin your communication with the key answer or recommendation you are giving. This captures your audience’s attention right from the start and sets the context for everything that follows.
- Support the answer with a handful of supporting arguments: Organise the main arguments from your analysis that support your answer or recommendation.
- Back up your supporting arguments with evidence and data: Substantiate each of your supporting arguments with relevant data.
So while we may think about an issue from the bottom up (where we start with the data, organise our supporting arguments and then come up with an answer), we should present our work from the top-down.
We start with the answer and then give our supporting arguments.
Here are two tangible examples of the top-down communication style in action in a legal context.
Example 1
This first example assumes you are an employment lawyer feeding back to the client after a review of some employment contracts they asked you to look at (*quick caveat - please don’t take this as actual legal advice on the enforceability of non-compete clauses, it’s just for illustration purposes).
Now let's apply the pyramid principle...
Example 2
This one assumes you are an M&A lawyer updating the partner on the due diligence you are doing on the target company.
Now let's apply the pyramid principle...
Hopefully you can clearly see the difference in the before and after in each example.
The best professionals use the top-down communication style to communicate with efficiency and, more importantly, clarity.
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Addleshaw Goddard | £52,000 | £56,000 | £100,000 |
| Akin Gump | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Ashurst | £52,000 | £57,000 | £125,000 |
| Baker McKenzie | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Bird & Bird | £47,000 | £52,000 | £98,000 |
| Bristows | £46,000 | £50,000 | £88,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £105,000 |
| Burges Salmon | £47,000 | £49,000 | £72,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | £50,000 | £53,000 | £88,000 |
| Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton | £57,500 | £62,500 | £164,500 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clyde & Co | £47,000 | £49,500 | £85,000 |
| CMS | £50,000 | £55,000 | £110,000 |
| Cooley | £55,000 | £60,000 | £157,000 |
| Davis Polk | £65,000 | £70,000 | £170,000 |
| Debevoise | £55,000 | £60,000 | £173,000 |
| Dechert | £55,000 | £61,000 | £165,000 |
| Dentons | £50,000 | £54,000 | £100,000 |
| DLA Piper | £50,000 | £55,000 | £110,000 |
| Eversheds Sutherland | £46,000 | £50,000 | £100,000 |
| Farrer & Co | £47,000 | £49,000 | £88,000 |
| Fieldfisher | £48,500 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Freshfields | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Fried Frank | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gibson Dunn | £60,000 | £65,000 | £180,000 |
| Goodwin Procter | £55,000 | £60,000 | £175,000 |
| Gowling WLG | £48,500 | £53,500 | £98,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| HFW | £50,000 | £54,000 | £100,000 |
| Hill Dickinson | £43,000 | £45,000 | £80,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| Irwin Mitchell | £43,000 | £45,000 | £76,000 |
| Jones Day | £56,000 | £65,000 | £160,000 |
| K&L Gates | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| Kennedys | £43,000 | £46,000 | £85,000 |
| King & Spalding | £55,000 | £60,000 | £165,000 |
| Kirkland & Ellis | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Latham & Watkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £174,418 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Mayer Brown | £55,000 | £60,000 | £135,000 |
| McDermott Will & Emery | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Milbank | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Mills & Reeve | £45,000 | £47,000 | £82,000 |
| Mischon de Reya | £47,500 | £52,500 | £95,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | £50,000 | £55,000 | £135,000 |
| Orrick | £55,000 | £60,000 | £160,000 |
| Osborne Clarke | £54,500 | £56,000 | £94,000 |
| Paul Hastings | £60,000 | £68,000 | £173,000 |
| Paul Weiss | £55,000 | £60,000 | £180,000 |
| Penningtons Manches Cooper | £48,000 | £50,000 | £83,000 |
| Pinsent Masons | £49,500 | £54,000 | £97,000 |
| Quinn Emanuel | n/a | n/a | £180,000 |
| Reed Smith | £50,000 | £55,000 | £125,000 |
| Ropes & Gray | £60,000 | £65,000 | £165,000 |
| RPC | £46,000 | £50,000 | £90,000 |
| Shoosmiths | £43,000 | £45,000 | £97,000 |
| Sidley Austin | £60,000 | £65,000 | £175,000 |
| Simmons & Simmons | £52,000 | £57,000 | £120,000 |
| Skadden | £58,000 | £63,000 | £173,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Squire Patton Boggs | £47,000 | £50,000 | £110,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | £50,000 | £55,000 | £100,000 |
| Sullivan & Cromwell | £65,000 | £70,000 | £174,418 |
| Taylor Wessing | £50,000 | £55,000 | £115,000 |
| TLT | £44,000 | £47,500 | £85,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
| Trowers & Hamlins | £45,000 | £49,000 | £80,000 |
| Vinson & Elkins | £60,000 | £65,000 | £173,077 |
| Watson Farley & Williams | £50,000 | £55,000 | £102,000 |
| Weightmans | £34,000 | £36,000 | £70,000 |
| Weil Gotshal & Manges | £60,000 | £65,000 | £170,000 |
| White & Case | £62,000 | £67,000 | £175,000 |
| Willkie Farr & Gallagher | £60,000 | £65,000 | £170,000 |
| Withers | £47,000 | £52,000 | £95,000 |
| Womble Bond Dickinson | £43,000 | £45,000 | £80,000 |
Rank | Law Firm | Revenue | Profit per Equity Partner (PEP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DLA Piper* | £3,010,000,000 | £2,400,000 |
| 2 | Clifford Chance | £2,300,000,000 | £2,040,000 |
| 3 | A&O Shearman | £2,200,000,000 | £2,200,000 |
| 4 | Hogan Lovells | £2,150,000,000 | £2,200,000 |
| 5 | Freshfields | £2,120,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 6 | Linklaters | £2,100,000,000 | £1,900,000 |
| 7 | Norton Rose Fulbright* | £1,800,000,000 | £1,100,000 |
| 8 | CMS** | £1,620,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 9 | Herbert Smith Freehills | £1,300,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 10 | Ashurst | £961,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 11 | Clyde & Co | £844,000,000 | £739,000 |
| 12 | Eversheds Sutherland | £749,000,000 | £1,300,000 |
| 13 | BCLP* | £661,000,000 | £748,000 |
| 14 | Pinsent Masons | £649,000,000 | £793,000 |
| 15 | Slaughter and May*** | £625,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 16 | Simmons & Simmons | £574,000,000 | £1,076,000 |
| 17 | Bird & Bird** | £545,000,000 | £696,000 |
| 18 | Addleshaw Goddard | £495,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 19 | Taylor Wessing | £480,000,000 | £915,000*** |
| 20 | Osborne Clarke** | £456,000,000 | £771,000 |
| 21 | Womble Bond Dickinson | £448,000,000 | £556,000 |
| 22 | DWF | £435,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 23 | Fieldfisher | £407,000,000 | £966,000 |
| 24 | Kennedys | £384,000,000 | Not disclosed |
| 25 | DAC Beachcroft | £325,000,000 | £700,000 |
What do City lawyers actually do each day?
For a closer look at the day-to-day of some of the most common types of lawyers working in corporate law firms, explore our lawyer job profiles:
Give people the right amount of context
This one’s really important in relation to all of your internal communications: give the right amount of context.
Modern law firms are fast-paced, demanding environments where lawyers often manage multiple time-sensitive matters simultaneously.
So always assume that the other lawyers you interact with internally are balancing several pressing matters at any one time.
When you communicate with them, assume you are requiring them to ‘task-switch’ - to momentarily park what they’re doing to deal with your message. That takes up significantly more mental energy than you might think.
Your job, therefore, should be to minimise the switch cost on the other person.
So make it as easy as possible for them by giving them the right amount of context about the relevant issue.
Imagine you are a busy partner working with an associate on one of the eight live matters you’re working on. Which of these would you rather receive from the associate?
So whenever you’re communicating with more senior colleagues internally, apply this framework:
- Be specific about what you need or what you are sharing
- Give the minimum viable amount of context
- Suggest the next step
For example, you’ve been told to speak to a partner in the tax department about an issue that’s come up on a transaction you’re working on.
Here’s what you could say when you pick up the phone to them:
What you’ve done is given the other person - the tax partner - all the information they need to make a decision without taking up an unnecessary amount of their time.
They don’t need to ask you what you really want from them. You’ve told them. You’ve given them the right amount of context about the issue.
Get in the habit of doing this and people will really enjoying work with you.
| Firm | London office since | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| Baker McKenzie | 1961 | Finance, capital markets, TMT |
| Davis Polk | 1972 | Leveraged finance, corporate/M&A |
| Gibson Dunn | 1979 | Private equity, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Goodwin | 2008 | Private equity, funds, life sciences |
| Kirkland & Ellis | 1994 | Private equity, funds, restructuring |
| Latham & Watkins | 1990 | Finance, private equity, capital markets |
| Milbank | 1979 | Finance, capital markets, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Paul Hastings | 1997 | Leveraged finance, structured finance, infrastructure |
| Paul Weiss | 2001 | Private equity, leveraged finance |
| Quinn Emanuel | 2008 | Litigation |
| Sidley Austin | 1974 | Leveraged finance, capital markets, corporate/M&A |
| Simpson Thacher | 1978 | Leveraged finance, private equity, funds |
| Skadden | 1988 | Finance, corporate/M&A, arbitration |
| Weil | 1996 | Restructuring, private equity, leverage finance |
| White & Case | 1971 | Capital markets, arbitration, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Law firm | Type | First-year salary |
|---|---|---|
| White & Case | US firm | £32,000 |
| Stephenson Harwood | International | £30,000 |
| A&O Shearman | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Charles Russell Speechlys | International | £28,000 |
| Freshfields | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | Silver Circle | £28,000 |
| Hogan Lovells | International | £28,000 |
| Linklaters | Magic Circle | £28,000 |
| Mishcon de Reya | International | £28,000 |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | International | £28,000 |
Use ‘What, So What, Now What’ to share information
This is another very simple yet powerful model to use whenever you’re sharing information - in-person or in an email or other message.
Here’s how it works:
Whenever you’re about to say or write something, follow these 3 steps:
- What: Describe and define the facts or situation - say what happened.
- So What: Discuss the implications or importance for the audience. In other words, the relevance of what’s happened to them.
- Now What: Set out the call-to-action or next steps, such as the actions you need the recipient to take or the actions you will now take, like setting up a next meeting or sending a document.
Use this as a template to help you write an email or memo. Literally, write the steps down, answer each question and that’s 90% of the communication done.
Here’s an example.
You’ve been asked to update the rest of the team on an important new case that was published yesterday.
Here’s how you should structure the update:
[What]
The decision in the X v Y case was published yesterday.
[So What]
The case has important implications on how material adverse change warranties in sale and purchase agreements will be treated by the courts.
It emphasises the need to include clear, precise and unambiguous wording when drafting MAC warranties to avoid any risk that parties are then unable to establish whether a MAC has occurred.
At the same time, if a MAC clause is drafted too narrowly by reference to specific events or thresholds, it may not capture a sufficiently wide range of potentially adverse circumstances.
[Now What]
If you are currently drafting or negotiating MAC warranties on a transaction, please discuss these with colleague X before they are shared with the client.
We are updating the warranties in our standard form sale and purchase agreement and we will notify you when this has been completed.
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A&O Shearman | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Clifford Chance | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Linklaters | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
| Slaughter and May | £56,000 | £61,000 | £150,000 |
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £52,000 | £57,000 | £125,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £105,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
| Firm | Merger year | Known for in London |
|---|---|---|
| BCLP | 2018 | Real estate, corporate/M&A, litigation |
| DLA Piper | 2005 | Corporate/M&A, real estate, energy, resources and infrastructure |
| Eversheds Sutherland | 2017 | Corporate/M&A, finance |
| Hogan Lovells | 2011 | Litigation, regulation, finance |
| Mayer Brown | 2002 | Finance, capital markets, real estate |
| Norton Rose Fulbright | 2013 | Energy, resources and infrastructure, insurance, finance |
| Reed Smith | 2007 | Shipping, finance, TMT |
| Squire Patton Boggs | 2011 | Corporate/M&A, pensions, TMT |
Last word
Ultimately, communication is much more than just writing professional emails and speaking eloquently - it’s about having the mental clarity and confidence to deliver the right message in the right way at the right time.
That can be difficult to illustrate on paper, but you know it when you see it.
Whether you’re a trainee drafting a first memo or a partner presenting highly technical advice to a major client, the same principles apply: keep it simple, get to the point, offer meaningful context, and always provide a clear next step.
If you can master these skills, you won’t just be the lawyer clients trust; you’ll be the lawyer they enjoy working with - and that is priceless.
Law Firm | Trainee First Year | Trainee Second Year | Newly Qualified (NQ) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ashurst | £52,000 | £57,000 | £125,000 |
| Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner | £50,000 | £55,000 | £105,000 |
| Herbert Smith Freehills | £56,000 | £61,000 | £135,000 |
| Macfarlanes | £56,000 | £61,000 | £140,000 |
| Travers Smith | £54,000 | £59,000 | £120,000 |
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