In a sea of brilliant law students all mastering the same academic knowledge, one student has stressed it’s those who’ve honed their soft skills, sharpened their communication, and gained real-world legal experience through law societies who truly stand out to firms.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Thomas Pereira, a law and commerce student at Monash University and careers director for his university’s Law Student Society, unpacked the wide-ranging professional skills law students can develop through involvement in their law society – regardless of the role they take on or the level of commitment they choose.
For Pereira, the standout benefit of getting involved in a law society is learning how to work effectively with others, developing collaboration skills that simply can’t be replicated or gained in other settings.
“The biggest thing is just teamwork and being part of a team. A lot of people have, at some point in their school years, been part of a team sport,” he said.
“Whilst that’s really great in that capacity, just doing it in a kind of more professional setting is a lot different and requires a few more different skills, which you probably haven’t really gained otherwise.”
Beyond teamwork, Pereira pointed to other critical professional skills fostered through law society involvement, including the opportunity to refine “communication skills” and build “meaningful networks”, not only with peers but also with established leaders across the legal profession.
As law degrees are heavily academic, focusing on mastering legal principles and interpreting statutes, Pereira explained that this foundational learning often leaves little room to develop the interpersonal skills essential in legal practice – a gap that law societies help fill.
“The legal degree that you just get taught at university is really the academic standpoint of learning all the substantive content that they need you to know,” he said.
“But there’s also so much of that soft skills side, which you never get taught at all. For example, you never get taught how to have a meeting with a client at university or anything like that, so I think trying to simulate that as much as possible is important.”
Through cultivating these soft skills early that are imperative to life and the day-to-day skills needed for a lawyer in an innovative way beyond the classroom, Pereira emphasised how it can “make yourself stand out from the crowd” when applying to law firms.
In a field where brilliance on paper isn’t enough, Pereira highlighted how mastering soft skills and gaining hands-on experience can give law students the edge they need to rise above thousands of equally qualified applicants.
“Even though you may be the smartest law student, if you can’t really interact with a client and they can’t put you in front of a client, your value to them diminishes quite quickly,” he said.
“So knowing that you’ve had those experiences and you’ve been in those situations and they don’t need to even spend time training you up, law firms don’t mind training you up, but if they know that you’ve already got those skills coming in, it’s one less stress on their mind when doing the selection process out of the thousands of students.”
