The Cornerstones of Organizational Relationships:

Consistency, Responsiveness, Competence

TLDR

• Competence alone is not enough

• People hire and rehire partners who are consistent, responsive and genuinely easy to work with

• Responsiveness, availability, demeanor and competence are treated as equal

• Soft skills are actually essential skills

• These lessons apply far beyond the legal world to almost any professional relationship

• Energy, clarity and the way you present yourself often matter more than technical explanations

• The people who succeed are the ones who make work feel lighter instead of heavier

Over the past almost three years at Thomson Reuters Institute, where my role is legal market researcher, I have spoken with almost three hundred senior legal decision makers at large organizations. This includes general counsels, assistant general counsels, chief legal officers and similar roles at organizations with revenues or operating budgets of fifty million dollars or more. Some of these have been local governments, state governments, municipal governments, nonprofit organizations and a whole range of corporate entities across many industries with revenues into the tens of billions. For confidentiality I cannot name any specific organizations.

These interviews are part of Thomson Reuters ongoing study into the relationship between in house legal counsel and the external law firms they hire. For background, companies hire external law firms to do a significant portion of their legal work. This could mean employment issues, litigation, mergers and acquisitions and everything in between.

It is important to be clear that these are not the views of Thomson Reuters. These are my personal reflections after conducting nearly three hundred interviews and my own takeaways. And I genuinely believe that many of the lessons from these conversations apply far beyond the legal world. You can extrapolate these concepts to almost any professional or inter organizational relationship.

The key finding is simple. Competence is extremely important, but if it is not paired with being the kind of person people actually want to work with, you get less work, less respect and fewer opportunities. People look for equal parts competence and what I will call workability. Workability includes responsiveness, availability, a constructive demeanor and the sense that collaborating with you is not draining or confusing. It is being the kind of person who makes the work easier rather than heavier.

One theme comes up almost universally. The feedback centers around responsiveness, meaning getting back to people in a timely manner. Availability. Demeanor. Competence. And all of these are talked about as if they sit on the same level. The people I speak with are the ones making internal hiring decisions about in house counsel, but they are also the people deciding which law firms their multi billion dollar organizations will hire and continue working with. This is not a nice to have. It is essential.

We often label these as soft skills, but we really cannot emphasize enough that soft skills are often just as important as any technical skill or any degree.

I can also add a personal reflection from my own experience starting an AI oriented nonprofit or socially driven startup. At every networking event or every meeting I have had, what people respond to the most is not the technical piece, even though I can explain the technical piece. What people gravitate toward is the message and the way I present it. People rarely ask me how any of it would work in a deep technical sense, even though I have an IT background. Instead, they respond to the clarity, the energy and the sense of purpose in how I talk about it. If I am excited about it, people get excited about it. It may sound simple to say, but it is essential.

All of this leads to a pretty straightforward conclusion. If you want to succeed in most professional environments, you need to be consistent, you need to be responsive and you need genuine regard for the people you are working with. Those three qualities show up again and again in every industry I have touched.

They are the cornerstones of how strong relationships are built, maintained and trusted.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.