How To Prepare Yourself To Be A Personal Injury Lawyer

Personal injury can be a fascinating area of law to practise. In TV and film it’s often glamorised, in the press it’s often demonised. There’s conflict, there’s drama, and there’s a lot of paperwork!

If you’re interested in becoming a personal injury lawyer, you have to be prepared for all of its aspects. In this blog, we’ve put together some key areas to help you focus your development.

Practice of personal injury law is usually split between handling defendant work (helping people or companies defend claims made against them) and claimant work (bringing those claims on behalf of injured parties). It is rare for law firms to have lawyers undertaking both kinds of work at the same time.

At Truth Legal, we deal with claimant personal injury work and so most of the information below will have that slant to it. However, a lot of the points we cover can apply no matter which ‘side’ you’re on – so we hope it will prove useful to you in any event.

Academics

It almost goes without saying that working hard to get a good understanding of the legal theory behind personal injury is very important. You can help this along by choosing electives and optional modules which cover personal injury and tort law wherever possible. This isn’t essential – so don’t worry if you have chosen other options in the past – but it will give you a grounding in personal injury and introduce you to its concepts at an early stage.

Personal injury law can be a hard area to study. Many of its central principles come from case law rather than statute, so it means getting your head around a variety of key judgments, as well as remembering which cases are important and why.

Fortunately, once you pass the academic stage of your legal career and get into practice, you can look up the details whenever you need them! But the skills of research and legal interpretation remain vital.

Empathy

People who have suffered a personal injury are often facing some of the worst episodes of their lives when they decide to make a claim, especially when they have suffered serious or life-changing injuries. It is important to be mindful of this when you are aiming to become a personal injury lawyer. Understandably, it can make some clients difficult to work with at times – and this in turn can be stressful. But if you recognise their position and be empathetic towards them, this can help with the client care side of personal injury practice immensely.

With all that said, there is a limit to how far you can take it. Empathy might make you want to tell your client exactly what they want to hear, but some things are more important, such as your duty to act in their best interests at all times. You have to keep your sense of objectivity in order to be an effective legal adviser to your clients.

Resilience

Practising personal injury law can be tough. Legal complications, high-pressure negotiations, the demands of client care, strict court deadlines, and often high workloads can all combine to make it a challenging area in which to work.

It is also a distinctly adversarial area of law. True, parties are encouraged to cooperate wherever possible, but claims will always involve some degree of opposing interests between the sides.

This means developing resilience is really important, so you face these obstacles and difficulties without negative effects to your well-being. There are many free resources online which can help you to build resilience, but it can take practice and commitment to get there.

Other key skills

And last, but not least, here are a few other sets of skills which it can be particularly helpful to develop for personal injury work:

• Organisation and time management skills
• Communication skills
• Negotiation skills

If you are keen to become a personal injury lawyer, being able to demonstrate that you have the abilities covered in this blog will really help when it comes to applying for jobs. Best of luck!