Public service lawyers often describe their work in the language of mission, service, and justice. Those ideals matter, but too often legal education and professional development understate the mechanism that makes those goals achievable in practice: relationships.

The mythology of the legal profession prizes intellect and adversarial skill. We celebrate the brilliant oral argument, the well-drafted memo, and the lawyer who bests their counterparty in a negotiation. Yet many of the most effective public service lawyers succeed not because they are the loudest voices in the room, but because they have spent years building trust with clients, policymakers, external stakeholders, and even opposing counsel. That is because government lawyering is fundamentally relational work.

As a law student and early in my career, I would have dismissed relationship-building as an important skill. But reflecting on over a decade serving as a lawyer in the federal government, it is the relationships I built that enabled my successes and left a lasting impression. Government lawyering is intensely collaborative. An attorney advising a federal agency may spend one hour discussing statutory interpretation with career officials, the next hour negotiating language with another agency’s counsel and the following hour briefing legislative staff on implementation concerns. None of that work succeeds without relationships.

For example, in my two years at the White House, I was the lead attorney for all issues related to Russia’s war against Ukraine and would have been entirely ineffective without developing close relationships. Take a single issue—developing a first-of-its-kind $50 billion loan to Ukraine which would be paid by the interest earned on frozen Russian sovereign assets instead of American taxpayers. First, development of the ing this idea required working hand-in-glove with clients working on both economic policy and Ukraine. Second, the concept needed to be backed by technical experts at USAID, the Treasury Department, and Office of Management and Budget, made easier by mutual trust built with each of their counsels. Third, the project rested on securing the EU’s approval, a move that required months of foundational work alongside lawyers and policymakers at the State Department and then directly with the European Commission. And finally, when questions arose as to how to spend the money, I had to work quickly with connects in the Department of Defense and USAID all while briefing congressional staff on both sides of the aisle. When the United States approved the funds for Ukraine in December 2024, it was made possible not just because fellow lawyers and I identified a creative legal path forward but also because of the relationships built and tended to over years with clients, with interagency lawyers, and with counterparts on Capitol Hill.

This is particularly true in modern administrative governance, where policy problems rarely fit neatly within one agency’s jurisdiction. National security, immigration, environmental regulation, public health, and cybersecurity all require overlapping institutional authorities. Lawyers operating in those spaces must become translators between organizations with different mandates and cultures.

Effective government lawyers learn how to navigate these differences without sacrificing legal integrity. That requires trust. Trust determines whether another agency calls you early enough to resolve a problem before it escalates publicly. Trust shapes whether congressional staff believe executive branch staff are communicating candidly about legal constraints. Trust influences whether career civil servants feel comfortable surfacing dissenting views that could materially improve decision-making. Relationships create channels for honest disagreement, faster coordination, and institutional resilience.

That work is often invisible to the public. A successful interagency negotiation rarely becomes a headline. Yet some of the government’s most consequential legal work happens in precisely those spaces. Consider the process surrounding sanctions policy against Russia. Legal questions could not be answered in isolation in my office at the White House. They required input from diplomats, intelligence officials, military personnel, economists, and legislative counsel. Lawyers for policymakers serve not merely as advisors but as connective tissue between institutions.

This is one reason why interpersonal skills should be treated as core competencies within government legal practice rather than secondary “soft skills.” Law schools excel at teaching doctrine and statutory interpretation. They are less effective at teaching students how to build coalitions or communicate effectively with policymakers who are not lawyers. Yet those capacities increasingly define success in public service law.

At its best, government legal practice is not about winning arguments inside isolated bureaucracies. It is about helping democratic institutions work together to respond to public action problems. That requires lawyers who understand people, institutions, and the value of trust.

July 2026