What’s in your legal toolkit?

Most lawyers focus on the gaps — what’s out of date, what they haven’t done, what a new role might require. But the more useful question is what you’ve already got. Probably more than you think.

There’s a question worth asking yourself before you update your CV, prepare for an interview, or take on a new role: what tools have you actually got?

Not job titles, sectors or the names of the firms you’ve worked for. The actual skills — the things you can do, the ways you work, the capabilities you’ve built up over a career that may well have taken a few unexpected turns.

Imagine every role you’ve ever done has added something to a toolkit. Some of the tools in there are bright and shiny — you use them constantly, you’re confident with them, they’re sharp. Others are a little rusty from lack of use, but they’re still in there. Occasionally you arrive somewhere new and realise there’s a tool you simply don’t have yet. That’s fine too. The question is whether you can adapt one you already own, or whether you need to go and find a new one.

This framing matters because it shifts the focus away from gaps — what you haven’t done, what’s out of date, what you might have lost during a career break — and towards what you have accumulated. If you’ve had a non-linear career, that accumulation is often broader and more interesting than you think.

The One You Take Everywhere

Technical legal skills are learnable. There are courses, books, AI tools, colleagues, external counsel, secondments. If your knowledge of a particular area has moved on since you last practised, that gap is fillable. It might take effort, but it’s not a blocker — and most experienced hiring managers know that.

The harder skills to acquire — and the ones that genuinely differentiate lawyers in practice — are the soft ones. Communication, time management, the ability to have a difficult conversation rather than avoid it and commercial judgment. Knowing when to give a legal answer and when to give a practical one, reading a room and managing up.

These are the skills people remember you for. They’re also, crucially, the skills that don’t atrophy during a career break. If you spent years negotiating complex transactions, you still know how to read a deal and what questions to ask. If you managed a team, you still understand how to give feedback well. If you spent time outside law — running a business, supporting a family, doing something completely different — you’ve almost certainly used and developed these skills, even if you haven’t been calling them that.

What In-House Experience Teaches You About the Toolkit

For lawyers moving into or returning to in-house roles, there’s a specific skill that tends to either develop or get uncomfortable very quickly: risk calibration.

In private practice — particularly in transactional work — the habit is to cover every angle, flag every risk, and make sure nothing is left unchecked. In-house, the business will often look you in the eye and say: yes, I can see the risk, and I’m fine with it. That adjustment — from risk-spotter to risk-partner — is one of the most important tools in the in-house lawyer’s kit. And once you have it, it makes you significantly more useful.

Similarly, project management skills built in transactional work translate directly into in-house environments. The ability to hold a process together, coordinate multiple workstreams, communicate status clearly to non-lawyers — these are precisely the bread-and-butter skills that in-house teams rely on.

How to Take Stock

If you’re preparing a CV, getting ready to return to work, or simply trying to articulate your value to a new audience, try this: instead of listing your roles, list what each role actually required you to do.

Not “Senior Associate, Finance, 2014–2018” — but: negotiated complex cross-border transactions, managed client relationships across time zones, developed junior colleagues, communicated risk to non-legal stakeholders, led on restructurings during a period of market stress.

Broken down that way, the themes start to emerge. You’ll find threads you didn’t know were there — and you may also find that some of the tools you thought were rusty are actually still in pretty good shape.

The toolkit isn’t static and every role adds to it. The question isn’t whether yours is complete — nobody’s is — but whether you know what’s in it.

We’re Here To Help

At Obelisk Support, we’re proud to support consultant lawyers and provide opportunities for legal professionals to thrive on their own terms.  If you’re on a consultancy journey, remember—you don’t have to do it alone. 

To find out more about working with Obelisk get in touch!