Teaching Soft Skills Including Online: A Review and Framework

Abstract

With Artificial Intelligence steadily advancing, emblematic of change broadly, many argue that soft skills will be the central determinants of a lawyer’s success. Soft skills comprise a ‘combination of competencies that contribute to how people know and manage themselves as well as their relationships with others’. However, there is real need for more scholarship on how to teach them at law school. Meanwhile, and accelerated by COVID-19, universities are changing their models in favour of online or blended learning. But again, there is very little research on what an online context can do to support soft skills learning. Indeed, online learning is associated with learner isolation, frustration, disengagement, all of which are at odds with socio-emotional skills development. This article provides a critical analysis of the meanings and importance of soft skills, and the structural factors against their prominence in legal education. It also reviews teaching practices across the tertiary sector, to provide frameworks and a set of strategies for teaching them to law students, with a focus on the digital format.