Knowing your audience is key to any effective blog project. So who actually is the audience for Listen Like a Lawyer? Who cares — I mean who actually does care — about listening enough to read this blog and share posts from time to time?

At the outset, Listen Like a Lawyer’s primary audience was practicing lawyers and legal professionals, kind of like a CLE in blog format. There is such thing as a listening CLE as well as many CLEs on communication with significant listening components. Compared with several hours of listening training that detract from billable or other core work, the benefit of the blog is regular reminders and varied content in small segments over time. As a proponent of listening, of course I would recommend both listening CLEs and  attention to small snippets of information spread out over time such as via this blog.

To reach lawyers, the blog has thus far tried to cover topics of general interest from marketing to litigation and mediation (with gratitude to guest Greg Parent) to management issues involving feedback and team dynamics. Some lawyers are highly engaged with listening in a particular context, such as listening to children (with gratitude to Karen Worthington for a wonderful guest post).

But this blog does not seek only to preach to the converted, i.e. great listeners who are engaged with listening concepts. My background is legal writing, and sometimes I get the feeling that many of the wonderful books and blogs on legal writing are devoured solely by lawyers who already care deeply about legal writing and are fantastic at it. Bryan Garner has written about the Dunning-Kruger effect as applied to legal writing: bad legal writers cannot even realize they are bad. We could debate how much Dunning-Kruger really applies to legal writers, but it most certainly does apply to listening. (Expect more elaboration in a future dedicated post.) Efforts to break through the unwarranted illusion of listening competence take a variety of forms.

One strategy is guilt and implied threat. Perhaps a lawyer is not getting good evaluations on soft skills due to listening problems. Perhaps a lawyer feels a lack of connection with clients and potential clients and wants to try some things to do better.

A rhetorical tactic for reaching less-engaged potential blog readers is through the Upworthy-style heading. I haven’t written that many headlines such as “10 Ways Your Law Career Is Being Sabotaged By Bad Listening!” or “The Secret Ingredient to Getting Clients to Love You in 60 Seconds.” But the blog has published some serious posts directly focused on listening problems such as mismatches in team communication styles, the crossover of bad listening into personal life, and issues with mobile devices and other forms of distractions. A few humorous posts have experimented with mock scare-tactics such as “Four Scary Kinds of Listeners” (a Halloween special) and “A High Intensity Listening Workout” — basically, Tabata for listening. Other forms of humor include Tami Lefko’s guest post with great TV clips on active-listening, and a compilation of listening advice for Valentine’s Day.

No lawyer has ever openly denied to me that listening is important, but there are often discernible traces of a passive, unengaged attitude. Most of all I think it comes from a fixed mindset — the belief you’re either a good listener or not, and probably can’t do much to change that fixed quality. This blog is really trying to break through that fixed mindset about listening and promote a growth mindset instead. Clearly we need more posts directly on the growth mindset. (Carol Dweck is the guru of this field and her book Mindset is a highly recommended read.) The growth mindset is the way out of guilt and threat as the motivation for learning.

In the spirit of growth, the blog has also sought to teach some subtle information that lawyers may not have encountered explicitly before such as the power of nonverbal communication and discourse markers in speech. Some of the posts have delved into topics that perhaps are more suitable for trial consultants, such as this early series on cognitive biases. I don’t think the blog has done enough to speak to legal professionals who work in teams with lawyers, and that is a gap I hope to remedy in the future.

Beyond lawyers and legal professionals, the blog’s other main intended audiences are law professors and law students. I’m still so grateful to Neil Hamilton for his in-depth law review article on listening, which confirmed for me that this is an important conversation to have in the legal-education community. This blog has therefore covered the classroom and other aspects of teaching. For law students, the blog has talked about listening in the classroom and in experiential situations. Georgia State’s Kendall Kerew contributed a wonderful guest post on listening skills in externships. You can expect additional future posts on intriguing ways to teach listening in law school.

So, more than a year later, how has everything turned out? Did these efforts to reach the various components of the blog’s intended audience actually work?

The blog has reached its core audiences. Law professors have been the most ready audience and the most positive in sharing and helping. Thank you to all friends and colleagues who have been so encouraging! I am also grateful to the Academic Support blog and many professors such as Susan Landrum and Gabrielle Goodwin who have shared posts with J.D. and L.L.M. students. Contributing to a conversation on educating future lawyers as good listeners helps the blog indirectly achieve its goal of encouraging better listening in the legal workplace among lawyers, clients, and judges.

One way I know the blog has been at least somewhat successful in reaching lawyers and legal professionals is that they have found this blog through interesting and relevant search terms. They have used social media to share various posts as well. On a personal note, many have been willing to talk with me and share their thoughts. I was grateful for the opportunity to guest-blog about listening at Legal Productivity. The audience of practicing lawyers and legal professionals is the blog’s most important target, and will be a more direct focus of blog content moving forward.

A very small, surprising audience has been clients affected by their lawyers. One search query that led someone to this blog was, “Do I have to listen to my lawyer?” These search queries may, ironically, lead the searcher to posts about lawyers’ ethical duties to listen (and not listen) to their clients.

A larger and more surprising audience has been undergrads or graduate students, most of them apparently working on listening-related term papers. The blog has been found by a lot of search terms for the HURIER model of listening and the Worthington-Fitch Hauser model of listening. Although it was not the blog’s intent to be a source for college term-papers, such readers are welcome and in fact should know that listening is crucial in the law-school classroom and interactions with judges and clients. In other words, effective listening yields a competitive advantage in law school and lawyering. That was a central theme of the blog at its outset and remains so today.

Thanks to all who have read Listen Like a Lawyer in its first year. Please keep the blog in your Twitter feeds, your Facebook status updates, and your RSS subscriptions. Also please feel free to send ideas for future posts. Writing this retrospective inspired a number of ideas and I look forward to sharing them.