Over at Law21, Jordan Furlong outlines six core skill sets necessary to practice law competently. Here’s the list, with excerpts of his explanations. The remainder is certainly worth reading and contemplating.

1. Collaboration skills. This isn’t just about “working well in a team,” essential as that is. This is about the ability to function in a multi-party work environment such that the process and outcome transcend the collective contribution — the whole surpasses the sum of the parts. Thanks to technological and social advances, this is how work is going to be done from now on.

2. Emotional intelligence. Clients need our empathy, perspective and personal connection to feel whole and satisfied; colleagues need our engagement, respect and understanding to be their best and help us succeed; everyone needs us to listen better than we do.

3. Financial literacy. There’s no excuse for lawyers to remain so steadfastly clueless about money: running a business, balancing a ledger, understanding tax principles, working with statistics, calculating profit margins, even explaining the rationale behind their fees.

4. Project management. It’s a growing refrain among clients, a chorus of frustration that most lawyers have zero skills in project management. Some lawyers wouldn’t even be able to define it: planning, organizing, and managing resources to successfully complete specific objectives while maintaining scope, quality, time and budget restrictions.

5. Technological affinity. Gerry Riskin recently called out the legal profession in a timely post on this subject: “too many lawyers pride themselves on their IT incompetencies, believing that it makes them somehow charming and brilliant.” … Here is a fact: technological affinity is a core competence of lawyering. If you can’t effectively and efficiently use e-mail, the Internet, and mobile telephony, you might as well just stay home.

6. Time management. A substantial part of lawyers’ difficulties in this regard lie with their inability to prioritize their tasks and manage their time. Lawyers are terrible at saying “no,” they’re awful at delegating work into more efficient channels, and amazingly, many are still compensated not by the tasks they accomplish but by how long they take to do them.

Law schools need to teach them; governing bodies need to test for them; law firms need to make their lawyers expert in them. They’re not optional, there are no excused absences, and the test is starting right about now.

Notwithstanding that the ability collaborate effectively is somewhat dependent on a fair degree of E.Q., project management skills and technological affinity, this is a great list, confirmed in part by Northwestern’s recent decision to incorporate a portion of this into their curriculum. This six-pack is particularly important to a solo or small firm attorney, as these are what will allow you to deliver (and just as important, to show) value to your clients.

If you’re still in law school, I’d certainly suggest taking some courses in accounting and finance at the business school, and keeping tuned to our channel here at NextLex. In time, we’ll be pointing you to useful information out on the interwebs, and also delivering courses and primers to help you acquire these skill sets.