lawyer can you hear me?
One of the major complaints about lawyers today is that they don’t take the time to really listen to their clients. This article from the Michigan Bar Journal suggests that lawyers need to acquire a new skillset called active listening. Active listening (a/k/a reflective listening) “involves identifying a client’s vaguely or inarticulately stated feelings and reflecting them back to the client to show understanding or to allow the client to correct a misunderstanding.” According to the article, active listening facilitates rapport, respect and relationship, the three guiding principles for framing a conversation. “Rapport means the ability to talk and listen to clients and make them feel both understood and important. Respect means valuing clients as people and not snickering about the decisions they have made, no matter how ludicrous, stupid, or naïve these decisions may appear to be. Relationship means connecting with clients because they are human beings, and as such, are more than simply a source of income or an opportunity to further one’s legal reputation.” Along with building these three rs, lawyers should listen for emotional words like fear, loss, anger and pain. Clients use emotional words to give “clues about how they experience and understand what is happening, or has happened, to them.” Recognizing that many lawyers might reject active listening as the touchy-feely stuff of psychotherapists, the piece aptly states: “the simple truth—no different than medicine, psychotherapy, or other professional endeavors—is that the law is about real people and the lives they live. In short, the law is a helping profession. In this regard, our work should have a sense of vocation about it, a sense of calling.”
