Reimagining Innovation in Law: Emphasizing Interpersonal Skills

Innovation is a protean concept in the legal profession and a popular buzzword. Law schools now offer legal innovation courses, law firms and companies have chief legal innovation officers on staff, and practitioners and scholars are paying closer attention to this topic, creating new frameworks, reforms, and textbooks. If, as Dyane O’Leary puts it in her book Legal Innovation & Technology (2023), “innovation: new idea + hand-on implementation = a better way of doing something,” how exactly do lawyers perceive innovation? Is it merely the creation and use of the newest technological tools? Or is there more to it?

To better understand how lawyers and law firms perceive innovation, the Law Ahead Center on the Legal Profession at the IE University in Madrid convened a group of three scholars— Antonio Aloisi, Pilar Galeote, and myself—whose work focuses on areas such as legal automation and technology, collaborative decision-making, negotiation, and leadership. Together, we conducted a novel empirical study, Innovation Beyond Technology. The Crucial Role of Skills in Driving Change in the Legal Profession: Perspectives from Lawyers at Major Firms in Spain, based on survey data from 460 legal professionals in Spain. The respondents work at the country’s top law firms and hold various positions, ranging from junior associates to managing partners, across multiple practice areas, including litigation, taxation, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

This study is the first of its kind to explore legal innovation in relation to both technology and what we refer to as “core” or “hard” skills—a term we use to reframe the commonly mischaracterized “soft” skills. In our view, core or hard skills include problem-solving, empathy, intellectual humility, and cultural competency, among others.

In a world driven by rapid technological change and the recognition of generative artificial intelligence as “a transformative force in the legal industry,” offering promises of efficiency, increased productivity, and better client outcomes, we aimed to examine whether lawyers see innovation solely as technological progress—or whether they also associate it with other dimensions beyond technology. Our findings confirmed the hypothesis that “innovation encompasses not only the adoption of technology but also the reorganization of work structures and, importantly, the cultivation of interpersonal skills, such as communication, negotiation, leadership, and management skills, as well as AI literacy.”

When individual lawyers were asked about what they associate innovation with, 58.2 percent responded that it relates to both mastering technology and developing new interpersonal skills. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that 93.5 percent of respondents believe that interpersonal skills are part of innovation in legal practice. This answer challenges the common belief that innovation is simply about using the most advanced technology to save time, money, and give lawyers enough room to focus on high-level tasks like judgment calls or legal strategy.

The study also shows that negotiation, collaborative decision-making, and communication skills, including active listening, persuasion, empathy, and emotional management, are the most valued interpersonal skills for both law firms and individual lawyers in Spain. This might respond to the fact that legal work involves allocating limited resources, brainstorming options to create value, dynamic teamwork to manage workload and economic pressures, listening to clients’ stories to uncover underlying desires and interests, and crafting narratives to persuade judges and legal officials to protect client’s interests. “Lawyers must understand their client, their team, the judge, and any other possible interlocutors involved in the case in question.” Active listening and effective communication are arguably among the most essential skills that make this understanding tangible.

While empathy and active listening are crucial for bridging the gap between lawyers and their interlocutors—i.e., clients, colleagues, and judges—lawyers and law school students spent more time honing their persuasion skills, rather than their listening habits. They believe influencing others through rational, logical, and coherent arguments is the most effective approach to succeed in legal practice. “Although listening may be ‘the type of communication we engage in the most and learn first, it requires a skill we are taught the least,” write Mark Weisberg and Jean Koh Peters in their article “Experiments in Listening.” “ A new look at innovation might open up new vistas in legal education by turning our attention to interpersonal skills like active listening as a way to explore alternative and innovative ways of lawyering.

Eight years ago, in a Stanford Law Review article, David Wilkins, faculty director of the Center for the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, and Scott Westfahl, Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School, highlighted the importance of “helping lawyers develop skills relating to innovation, design thinking, and leading innovation-focused teams effectively.” The recent study builds on and expands this insight by demonstrating that this innovative drive in the legal profession is not solely satisfied by technology like generative AI.

Innovation requires greater emphasis on interpersonal skills—such as empathy and active listening—that have long been marginalized in legal education but are essential and pervasive in legal practice. The report concludes that equating innovation solely with technology is a narrow view and distorts the perception of legal professionals in the Spanish context. Innovation is “about embracing new ways of working, thinking, and collaborating. It calls for lawyers to integrate their legal expertise with client needs, technological tools, and interpersonal skills, fostering both collaboration and shared decision-making,” the report notes.

This has important implications for legal education. Instead of reorienting legal education to accommodate automation practices and preparing it for an eventual takeover of AI, law schools might consider adjusting their curriculum to develop relational skills, such as negotiation, leadership, communication, and client dynamics, to innovate beyond technology.

Revamping legal education to focus on skill development aligns with the Next Generation Bar Exam, set to debut in some states in July 2026. This exam will assess both foundational legal concepts and principles as well as core skills such as client counseling and advising, negotiation and dispute resolution, and client relationship management. For example, law school students, according to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, will be tested on how to determine “the best strategy for identifying a client’s needs and interests underlying the client’s stated objectives, in order to help the client set goals in a matter.” To do this effectively, lawyers must enhance their communication, negotiation, and client interaction skills. But how can law schools achieve these goals?

The study introduces the TIE lawyering model—technological mastery and digital skills (T), development of interpersonal skills conducive to collaboration and better client engagement (I), and awareness of ethical dimensions, professional standards, and risks that threaten the integrity and accountability of legal practice. This model does not exclude in-depth legal analysis of significant issues; it simply broadens the scope of skills lawyers in the twenty-first century must adopt. “The TIE Lawyering model of legal expertise introduces the “innovation triad”—technology, interpersonal skills, and ethics—as a framework to help lawyers navigate the complexities of their dynamic and often unpredictable work environments,” the report explains.

The TIE model also aligns with David Wilkins’s predictions regarding how technological advancements, socio-political and economic pressures on law firms and law schools, and the drive to innovate legal practice are shaping the profession’s efforts to remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. In Wilkins’s words, “being an empathetic listener. It involves thinking about how to work collaboratively with people who have different orientations and perspectives, and who bring different theoretical or methodological lenses to problems. It’s being a member of the team, not always leading the team.” Helping future generations develop their interpersonal skills like collaborative problem-solving, empathetic listening, and teamwork is another way to get back to the future—not just with technological tools, but also with underdeveloped human skills. Innovation is a protean concept, but perhaps we need to look back to the human dimension of communicating, problem-solving, collaborating, and listening to be truly innovative in our legal practice.

Nicolás Parra-Herrara is Associate Professor and Wagner/Holbrook Presidential Chair in Negotiations at S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. He was previously a student fellow with the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.