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I assume that the 'soft skills' are just as important as the hard skills that law school teaches? Are there any classes or courses that teach these skills?

Wtf is a soft skill?

Soft skills enable you to relate in an effective manner with other people and with your your work. They include communication skills, the ability to make decisions,self-motivation, creativity and problem solving skills, the ability to project empathy.

Maybe tangentially in a clinic; otherwise, you either know how to be a human or you're sociopathic. Both of which are marketable traits.

Some (most?) law schools offer courses on negotiations. And of course legal writing is supposed to address communication skills. That's probably the closest to what you're talking about. Nothing that I saw in law school taught anything at all related to how to make decisions, self-motivation, or projecting empathy.

Some law schools offer leadership courses, which occasionally include material on emotional intelligence.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:Nothing that I saw in law school taught anything at all related to how to make decisions, self-motivation, or projecting empathy.

Just to qualify this a bit: Some negotiations courses spend a unit or more on emotional intelligence, and a variety of courses have assignments that involve negotiations. There also seems to be a decent number of courses on other soft skills across the T14.

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/law-sch ... urriculum/
http://web.law.columbia.edu/courses/sections/18919

May have just been my law school, then - we had negotiations and mediation, but I don't think they had much to do with self-motivation. The Columbia coursed aren't law courses, though, and most of the NU stuff isn't courses for academic credit.

Edit: I think my reaction springs mostly from disbelief that law schools actually care about soft skills, even if there are opportunities available.