Actionable Ways for Lawyers to Succeed in 2025

Ask ten lawyers how they define success, and you’ll hear ten different answers. Some may link success to “helping others,” “making more money,” “achieving a healthy work-life balance,” or “retiring early,” but one thing will be true: the answers will all be rooted in the practice of law.

Now ask yourself how you define success. What can you do to achieve this success, and once you’ve achieved it, how can you maintain it?

Here are three actionable ways for lawyers to achieve and maintain success in their professional and personal lives. 

Enhance Soft Skills

Soft skills are personal qualities like good communication, enthusiasm, emotional intelligence, positive attitude, and teamwork. While they may seem trivial when compared to the hard skills a lawyer should possess—think legal research, regulatory compliance, and legal writing, for instance—soft skills play a vital role in how you run your law practice.

Common soft skills include:

• Time management
• Writing skills
• Emotional intelligence
• Stress management
• Adaptability
• Flexibility
• Communication
• Teamwork
• Critical thinking

Zeroing in on soft skills that require your attention can be a great way to achieve success in 2025. Give yourself a critical look and jot down soft skills you can improve upon.

How to Improve Your Communication Skills

Proper communication is paramount when it comes to success as an attorney, especially if you want to avoid upsetting clients or opposing counsel. But when you are busy, it can be easy to lose track of time and forget to respond to an email or call a client back. 

Here are some ways to overcome communication issues:

Apply the 24-Hour Rule

If you struggle with timely communication, consider implementing the 24-hour rule. When something significant happens or your client makes an inquiry, respond within 24 hours via phone or email.  Significant events may include:

• Deadlines
• Court filings
• Discovery
• Settlement offers

Use the Right Method of Communication

Different situations will require different means of communication. For example, if you need to go over a complex issue, give your client a call so you can talk back and forth about the details. Emails or texts should be reserved for quick messages that don’t require too much explanation. 

Remember to practice caution when emailing or texting as tone cannot be conveyed clearly over text. If you need to discuss sensitive information with your client, try to meet in person. If that’s not possible, give your client a call. 

Become a Trauma-Informed Lawyer

Another great way to enhance your communication is by learning more about trauma-informed lawyering. When working with clients who have experienced trauma, it’s crucial to be as trustworthy as possible. This isn’t to say you should become your client’s therapist but practicing active listening and avoiding victim blaming can go a long way. Avoid vocalizing criticism or judgment of your client's past decisions or choices and stick to practical advice on improving their legal situation. Ask the right questions and let your client speak for themselves. Before long, your client will feel more comfortable sharing information.

Implement AI Tools into Your Practice

Artificial intelligence is here to stay—why not make the most of it? As AI tools continue to grow and evolve, they become more viable options for attorneys.  You can use AI to streamline your law practice and simplify time consuming tasks.

Understanding and Overcoming the Pitfalls of AI

Before delving into how AI can help streamline your workflow, it’s important to mention some very real issues AI tools can pose. Artificial intelligence can hallucinate answers that aren't correct or even based on truth.

Privacy is also a concern. If you enter you or your client's personal information into an AI tool, that information can be used to train the tool itself, leading to potential issues down the road. As with any new tool, it's necessary to be vigilant and exercise caution when using AI. 

One of the best ways to use AI tools is by paying for them. Yes, many AI tools offer free services or free tiers, but they produce less accurate results and place a daily limit on the number of messages or queries you can make. Paid versions provide more accurate, nuanced results. For instance, the difference between the free version of Chat-GPT (GPT-4o mini) and the paid version (GPT-4o) comes down to the following:

• Model size
  • As its name suggests, GPT-4o mini is the smaller, lightweight version of this current iteration of Chat-GPT. GPT-4o features a larger model size and more parameters. It is designed for complex tasks and offers higher performance.
• Capabilities
  • GPT-4o mini is not as capable when it comes to nuanced reasoning, long-context comprehension, or complex queries. GPT-4o features higher accuracy, advanced reasoning, and better contextual understanding.
• Performance
  • Since it's "smaller," GPT-4o mini is able to produce results faster than GPT-4o. These more efficient results may be more suitable for applications that require fast responses. GPT-4o may take more time and resources to process but the results will be richer, more detailed, and more accurate.

GPT-4o mini may be fun to use to get a "feel" for what AI has to offer, but if you're planning to use AI for your business, then it's best to choose the paid version.

Don't let these pitfalls deter you from the use of AI. With each passing day, AI evolves and becomes more sophisticated. In fact, there are various AI tools that are specifically beneficial for lawyers. Below are two of the best AI-powered tools for lawyers.

Perplexity AI — Combining the Best of AI and Search (Pro $20/Month)

How often do you look something up on Google? Perplexity is an AI tool that bills itself as an "alternative to traditional search engines." It works like any regular search engine, but the results it provides are more in-depth and properly sourced.

The paid version of Perplexity (Perplexity Pro) offers users the ability to choose from powerful AI models from ChatGPT or Claude (Chat-4 Omni, Claude 3 Sonnet or Claude 3 Haiku). Perplexity Pro also offers "at least 300 Pro searches per day" and file analysis options.

Perplexity AI can help attorneys by offering:

• Accelerated legal research
• Comprehensive case analysis
• Streamlined contract review
• Real-time access to legal trends and information
• Improved brief writing
• Assistance on repetitive tasks

Notion AI — Create Your Very Own Digital Personal Assistant ($8/Month)

On its own, Notion is a highly popular and robust productivity and note-taking application. Students, professionals, and hobbyists rely on it regularly. If you take the time to fill out your Notion with projects and upcoming tasks, it can become your very own personal digital assistant.

Recently, Notion introduced AI capabilities to make this more achievable. While most AI chatbots base their responses on the myriad of webpages that populate the Internet, Notion AI uses information from your own Notion, Slack, and Google Drive to find answers, generate documents in your own style, or analyze images, PDFs, and other files.

Best of all, Notion "handles data with discretion," meaning they do not use user data to train their AI model. Notion also provides secure encryption. Click here to learn more about Notion's AI security and privacy practice.

Notion AI may benefit lawyers by:

• Providing personalized responses based on information from Notion and other applications such as Google Drive and Slack.
• Tracking tasks and projects.
• Quickly analyzing and summarizing PDFs.

For a much more in-depth look into this topic, watch our video about the seven best AI-powered tools for lawyers with attorney, TOJI Director, and resident AI expert Joshua Weaver.

Put an Emphasis on Digital Marketing

Simply put, digital marketing is one of the best ways for attorneys to achieve success in 2025. It may be easier to hire a marketing company to take care of your needs, but you can also take matters into your own hands. 

To get started, focus on the following:

• Online reviews: Be it on Google, Yelp, or Avvo, online reviews influence the decision-making process of potential clients. If you have a few negative reviews, you may be passed over. Put your name in Google and see what comes up. How can you remedy the results? One option is to respond to both negative and positive reviews. Provide additional context, but don’t come off as “finger pointing.” You can also consider reaching out to past clients to ask for reviews. Before long, your online reviews will begin to show who you truly are, and potential clients will feel more confident to reach out.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): By creating content for your website that includes the right keywords, your law firm will appear towards the top of local Google search results. Make sure to include your city throughout as well. 
• Social media marketing: Social media offers lawyers excellent opportunities to grow their reach while showing your personality and insight. Consider using sites like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to grow your audience. Unsure what to post about? Ask ChatGPT for some ideas! You can also use scheduling apps like Hootsuite and HubSpot to schedule posts ahead of time.

This is just barely scratching the surface when it comes to social media marketing. For a closer look, check out our ultimate social media guide for attorneys.

Make 2025 The Year You Take Your Law Firm to the Next Level

It may seem overwhelming, especially with a whole new year ahead of us, but by setting manageable goals and devoting time to create a plan of attack, you’ll soon begin to reap the rewards and start to see the success you deserve.

Despite the length of this blog post, we’ve barely scratched the surface on these topics. For additional insight, check out these publications from TexasBarCLE:

• Business Skills for Lawyers
• The User Experience In Client Relationships
• Perception Is Everything: How To Be Perceived As A Leader
• Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and The Practice Of Law In Texas
• ChatGPT In Civil Litigation: Artificial Intelligence & Brief-Writing
• The Effects And Uses Of Artificial Intelligence On Trial Strategy And Preparation
• Converting Content To Clients: Social Media Strategies For Lawyers
• Building Your Brand
• Ten Tips for Lawyers Dealing With Stress, Mental Health, And Substance Use Issues