By  Harmony Decosimo

It’s hard to believe, but the arrival of the first few snowflakes and the panicked expressions on student faces remind us that it’s true: another fall semester is coming to an end. For 1Ls, the end of the first semester is particularly fraught because of the impending arrival of final exams and with them, the first set of final grades.
While first year grades are undoubtedly important, now seems like a good time to remind anxious students of something even more important, and happily, largely unrelated to exam performance: their character.

Indeed, one’s character – and specifically, one’s reputation for trustworthiness – is not only critical to building strong relationships and living a meaningful and happy life, it’s an essential quality of good and ultimately successful lawyers.

This opinion isn’t mine alone – it’s shared by the folks who are doing the hiring! When legal employers across the country were asked to identify what they believe are the most essential qualities in recent law school grads, they did acknowledge that legal skills and competencies are important, with legal writing and research among the most important. But they emphasized that those skills can and will develop over time. With that in mind, they stressed that right out of law school, the most important qualities to possess, the nonnegotiables that can’t await development, are high moral character, including honesty or trustworthiness.

So what actually is trustworthiness? Well, philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists largely agree that trustworthiness is established by positive confirmation of three things: authenticity, competency, and benevolence. As early as their 1L year, students can and should attend to both the development of these traits and, of particular relevance to us in LPS, how to communicate them well to others. Let’s briefly look at each quality in more detail.

First, a trustworthy person is authentic – they are open about who they are, and what they value. For students, there are myriad opportunities to practice authenticity in their conduct and their communication. An obvious example is simply being honest with a professor about why you are late to a meeting, or being willing to articulate your (even unpopular) views to your classmates. In writing, adopting a personal voice and simple style that avoids jargon and legalese does wonders to communicate authenticity and thereby build trust with readers. Accurate and open representation of the law, especially when it doesn’t seem to serve you, is also critical to demonstrating authenticity and thus trustworthiness as a legal writer.

Second, a trustworthy person is competent. The people who know them or their work believe they have the skill and ability to get the job done well. Establishing competency in something like legal writing can seem overwhelming to a 1L – and that makes sense, the learning curve is steep. But the good news is that competency can both develop and be signaled in small but powerful ways over time; when, for example, a student uses CREAC to answer an exam question. Or, when it’s obvious to a professor that a student has carefully proof-read their memo, or included the correct pincites in a correctly-formatted citation. These small but important expressions of competency – of a learned skill, rightly employed – truly matter in building trust.

Interestingly, research indicates that people tend to latch on to positive signs of competency, and negative signs of authenticity. In other words, if they’ve seen your brilliance once, they tend to believe you’re a brilliant person, even if you slip up here or there. But, if they believe you’ve been dishonest in some way, it’s a lot harder to recover, relationally. The upshot is that incompetency mistakes can typically be fixed by acknowledgement, apology, and hard work – where perceived dishonesty can’t. This reality is critical for a young lawyer (or student) to remember in times of stress or when faced with a mistake.

Finally, a trustworthy person is a benevolent, or compassionate, person. At the very least, they must seem to truly care about other people, to act towards another’s good. We tend to talk about this quality quite a bit in LPS when teaching client interview skills. Demonstrating to a client that you are not only good at your job but that you care about them is essential in building the trust necessary for vulnerability, which is particularly important when seeking information where discomfort or trauma is involved.

As the semester draws to a close and stress levels are high, students are tempted to lose sight of the things that matter most. Helping them remember that who they are is more important than how they perform is a privilege as a teacher. And we can do more than simply remind them – we can work in our classrooms and day to day interactions to model authentic, competent, and compassionate practices and conduct. After all, when it comes to writing and to life, it’s more important to show than to tell.