Marketing, business development, making Tik Tok videos, getting featured or profiled here and there, and such matters are things one does purportedly for attracting legal work. These are not skills for producing high-quality legal work. They are an enervating distraction, especially to the development of a young lawyer’s legal abilities.

For myself, there are 4 basic skill sets every lawyer must possess: the ability to read, write, speak and think. I know anyone literate can do these things as many do. But a lawyer ought to have so developed, polished and refined each of these skills that they perform these abilities to a far higher level and quality than the common man with the benefit of knowledge of the law and its practice.

An analogy I draw is with the sport of golf. You and I can hit a golf ball. Our clubs connect with the ball. But the ball doesn’t go where we want it to. Often it finds the worse place to end up. We lack precision and consistency with our swing. We mistime it. We misgauge the distance. We duff our shots. We misread the greens. All the expensive equipment in the world couldn’t make us a better player.

We realize the meagreness of our ability when we compare ourselves with a professional golf player. We marvel at the sheer control, accuracy and confidence in which they perform. The pro does not look for an area to hit, he has picked out a spot. We have a margin error of 50 meters; the pros play to a margin of 5 feet. We aim to get it anywhere in the green (janji sampai); the pros are working out where to place it on the green to set themselves up for the next shot.

We and the pros are playing golf but to very different degrees such that they are almost different games. The level a common golf pro plays to is several magnitudes greater than your average social club player like me.

That should be the gulf in which a lawyer differs from the common man in our ability to read, write, speak and think: several orders of magnitude greater. If we, as lawyers, cannot do this then we offer no value to our services save for the ability to regurgitate the law, which any law student can do.

The first skill I want to discuss is reading. Reading is the ability to absorb written information. Firstly, not many like to read these days and even less read. A rare few make it a point to do so. And this regrettably includes lawyers. The less we read, the less we absorb. Reading transports us from a state of ignorance into an informed state.

Secondly, when I say just read, I do not simply just mean scanning a page and allowing the words to pass before our eyes. When I say read, I mean engaging with our reading material with awareness, nuance, empathy, sensitivity and honesty whilst bringing to bear the full brunt of our experience, knowledge, discernment and learning. I mean critically reflecting on what we read. I mean actually being focused on the material instead of being concerned about how we look at reading in a public area.

I mean reading widely and diversely; read every day; read everything and anything. Read up on your area of law. Then those out of it. Then those around it. Read foreign judgments. Read academic articles. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read labels, news, obituaries, epistles, and poetry. Read utter trash. Read the sacred. Everything in between. All of that will build your vicarious experience of life. It builds up your store of human life experience and human behaviour patterns from which we can draw upon when dealing with others.

Reading improves the next skill I want to discuss: writing. Lawyering and language are intimately connected because a lawyer’s role is about communicating. Writing relates to the ability to express ourselves textually. It is a separate and independent skill from reading. Writing is important because, as lawyers, we will have to inevitably produce something textual – an affidavit, a sale and purchase agreement, a statement of claim, formal correspondence, memorandums, etc. and we have to do it often.

As a lawyer, it is not enough to simply write. Since we have to write at a high level, our writing should be clear, engaging, meaningful, efficient and persuasive. The better we write, the more we are read, the more we are read, the more persuasive we can be. Poor writing is pretentious, pompous, ambiguous, confusing and dishonest. Poor writing puts people off. It enervates the reader. It makes difficult what should be easy. Above all, it is a waste of time.

In order to write well, like reading, we have to do it often. Ideally, we should do it every day. A great way to start or keep the momentum is by journaling. Even writing for just 10 minutes a day is helpful and healthy. Write for a reason. Write for no reason. For the hell of it. Mimic writers you like. Steal from those you love. Type out their words. Write what you like. Write about what you don’t like.

Word by word, phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph, our writing abilities will develop and hopefully, eventually coalesce. But simply reading will not make us better writers. We must engage in the act itself. Writing well is not a widespread skill in Malaysia. Poor writing is common among the majority of lawyers, judges and judicial officers. Many write stilted, formalized, routinized, pompous prose peppered with cliched phrases or formats. Just because we are right, does not mean we well write.

Speaking relates to the ability to express ourselves verbally. It is closely linked to writing because it relates to the expression of our thoughts or feelings. The difference in medium means that speaking is also separate and independent from writing or reading, although intimately connected. If we read or write well, it does not mean we can necessarily speak well. I remember having a lecturer in university who was blindingly brilliant on paper but an absolute bore in the lecture halls. So just because we write well does not mean we will speak well.

Even though we speak to others every day, performance speaking, which is what we lawyers have to engage in is a different thing. When lawyers speak, we do so to inform, communicate or persuade. As professionals, we have to do so in a manner that is clear, efficient and effective. That means elocuting our words correctly. When we do so, our pronunciation of the words is clear. It is efficient because there is no ambiguity about the words used. There is less need for interpretation. It is effective because we are understood immediately.

When words are elocuted properly and matched with discernment over how we modulate our voice, control our volume, phrase our words and know when to speak (aside from what to say, of course), we become persuasive. Our communication faces fewer barriers to acceptance. In fact, it is looked forward to. There are some lawyers that are so cultured and cultivated in their advocacy that it is a pleasure to listen and watch them perform. That is the standard we should strive for in our speech: cultivating a desire in others to be genuinely interested to listen to what we have to say.

The last skill I want to discuss is that of thinking. Thinking is the ability to critically reflect, fairly and honestly consider or curiously inquire into something and formulate a response after. Having thoughts float about in our head is not thinking. Thinking is the deliberate act of focusing our mind on something and considering it critically and honestly for a certain length of time. Thinking, honesty and a tenacious ability to ask why are critical. You cannot have one without the other.

There are several ways to go about thinking. It is not only done sitting down quietly and manipulating the thoughts in our head. Writing is a form of thinking. Speaking to others is a good way to develop thoughts. Keeping our body busy while the mind is quiet, allows room for thinking to happen. The more we think the better quality thoughts we have, the more points of view we have, and the more methods of thinking we acquire.

For myself, the critical part about thinking is not how much raw brain power we have but how honest we are about how we think about something. If we are not honest in our consideration and exercise wilful blindness about things we do not like, that is not thinking; that is deceiving one’s self and then others. Deception is not thinking. The ones that have caused the most widespread harm, directly or indirectly, are intelligent. The less honest we are in our thinking, the less honesty there is in the world.

The need to think in performing our legal work should go without saying. But what needs saying is that whenever we perform our legal work (non-administrative routine matters), we always, always have to think. Most legal work is about coming up with solutions to people’s problems with others. Thinking is always necessary to arrive at a solution. To recommend a ‘standard’ solution is not thinking, it is habit.

These four skills of reading, writing, speaking and thinking are separate, independent skills which intimately relate to and influence each other. They are like muscles, the more we work them the stronger they get. The development of one does not necessarily result in the improvement of the others. Each has to be cultivated separately until they are high enough to mutually reinforce and integrate with each other as a collective whole. And once they are, it becomes a formidable whole.

It is these skills that enable lawyers to produce high-quality legal work. It is these skills we need to possess and cultivate such that we do so at a magnitude of several orders greater than the common man.

Why do we need to do that? Because we are the pro.