Category: Clinical legal education

Future trial lawyers, take heart

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Listen Like a Lawyer will be delving into communication and writing in the next few posts. One reason this blog is generally dedicated to listening is that there are already many excellent legal-writing blogs available for the legal community. (For example: Forma Legalis, Lady Legal Writer, Law Prose, Legible,  and Ziff Blog, just to cite a few.) The writing-related posts here will connect to broad communication themes such as voice, empathy, and the relationship between senior and junior lawyers emerging from a lot of writing and talking as well as reading and listening.

Law professor Philip N. Meyer once did an unusual thing: he spent thirteen weeks observing a federal jury trial on a daily basis. Day after day throughout an entire summer, Meyer sat as a watcher and listener, taking in the spectacle of the trial and everything it entailed—from the painful moments to the surprisingly lighthearted. Leaving court late at night, he spied the lead defense lawyer sitting alone in a car in a remote parking lot with the windows rolled up, practicing his closing argument. This experience is just one of many inspirations for his book Storytelling for Lawyers (Oxford 2014).

Storytelling for Lawyers has neither a chapter on listening nor an index entry on listening. The book is about talking and writing—in other words, producing—narratives, much more than listening as such.  But Meyer mentions listening on page 2, talking about his work as a trial lawyer:

I learned to watch and listen to how my audience listened to me, and I would respond to their concerns, reshaping my stories to fit the shape of their imagining.

The book is about crafting stories that will resonate with audiences, whether at trial or in motions practice. So I recommend it.

But now let me get to the point of this post and why I titled it “Future trial lawyers, take heart.” Meyer teaches a variety of classes including doctrinal classes in criminal law and torts. In his chapter on voice and style, he begins with a reflection on what it’s like to grade law-school examinations:

As I grade these examinations, as best I can articulate it, the singular difference between the mediocre examination answers (C and below) and the middling to good examination answers (B-range grade) is primarily in the “substance”—whether students can identify the relevant issues and accurately articulate the relevant legal rules necessary to analyze the problem.

The distinction between the B exams and the A exams is, however, primarily in the “voice” and “style” of presentation. Voice and style, however, mean something much different in the context of law school examination taking than in the artful trial and appellate narratives that litigation attorneys construct in a factually far more complex and indeterminate world. (This, I think, speaks to why excellent litigation attorneys were often poor law school test takers.)

Meyer goes on to explain that the voice and style of top law school examinations “clamp[] down” on the facts, use clean organization, and employ the King’s English.  The student’s voice must be neutral and must not call attention to itself. “A” exams certainly don’t use colloquialism or humor. And they don’t explore the story embedded within the exam hypothetical in any depth. Meyer quotes a former student describing the events in an exam as “floating factoids.”

This is just one professor’s reflection on his experience grading exams, and he prefaces all of this by saying he grades holistically rather than with a detailed objective checklist. Still, it’s refreshingly transparent and I think every law student should read this—especially those just receiving their first round of law-school grades.

Law students who want to get into the courtroom and try cases may be disappointed that the skills distinguishing great trial lawyers maybe aren’t really tested in this (very popular and prevalent) type of law-school exam. That disconnect is the subject of discussion, critique, and reform, and more discussion, critique, and reform. The positive side here is that Meyer’s reflection invites law students to understand their grades as only loosely related (if there is much of any relationship) to how they might expect to perform in court.

Meyer’s reflection on the emasculated role of facts in many law school exams reminded me of an attorney’s recent #PracticeTuesday tweet. Bryan Gividen was responding to a call to bust law students’ myths of what it means to be a lawyer:

 

Working with the facts, crafting the story, developing a voice, testing whether the voice and the story resonate with an audience, all of these tasks are deeply connected with what it means to be a trial lawyer. The best appellate lawyers experiment with all of these things as well, but there are limits: the idea of “clamping down on the facts” by rigorously adhering to the record, and controlling one’s voice for the genre of the appellate brief and the audience of the appellate panel. Gividen draws this line when he identifies competitive appellate work as an exception to “practicing the facts.”

Any law student or lawyer who wants to develop their skills practicing the facts should benefit from studying Storytelling for Lawyers. Meyers concludes the book with a reflection on why law stories are different from stories told by journalists, filmmakers, and artists:

A final characteristic of law stories, especially the stories told in litigation practice, is that these stories are typically open or unfinished stories—their endings are strongly implied but not ordered or prescribed. It is up to a decision maker to write the ending, provide the closure and the coda that gives the story its meaning, and determine the outcome.

Legal storytelling has a rich literature, and anyone intrigued by this brief exploration of Meyer’s book would enjoy delving into the legal storytelling/applied legal storytelling scholarship. One gem is  Ruth Anne Robbins’ Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers, and Merlin: Telling the Client’s Story Using the Characters and Paradigm of the Archetypal Hero’s Journey, 29 Seattle L. Rev. 767 (2006). She argues that the client should not look to the judge as the hero and savior; the client should show how they are traversing a series of challenges and need the judge’s help in a mentoring role. The client is the real hero, a flawed hero but a hero nonetheless, seeking to carry on with their larger, bigger, more meaningful challenge. So the judge is not supposed to save the client; the client can save themself if they can just get through this lawsuit and carry on with their larger quest. Thus the opposing party is not the true antagonist but merely a “threshold guardian” impeding the client’s real quest.

Law students can take heart in this advice as well, in understanding their own personal story and quest. Law-school exams are basically a “threshold guardian.” They are a gatekeeping challenge the law student must face in the larger quest for something more meaningful.

 

 

 

Loving your lawyer (part 1)

Jennifer Romig1 Comment

Last week once again America—or at least American lawyers—celebrated “Love Your Lawyer Day.” See also #loveyourlawyerday on Twitter. Beyond the marketing hype, there’s a good question:

What makes people love their lawyers?

The first answer is competence. A 2002 study of how the public perceives lawyers found the majority of consumer clients to be satisfied with their lawyers:

Consumers tell stories of lawyers who apply significant expertise and knowledge to their cases, identify practical solutions, and work hard on behalf of their clients.

The survey also delved into various aspect of lawyers’ performance with clients. 72 percent of clients were very satisfied with their lawyer’s knowledge of the law. The study did go into some factors beyond hard-skill competence. For example, 68 percent were very satisfied with how the lawyer handled the initial conversation.

This study did not ask participants to rank which criteria were most important, or most strongly correlated with satisfaction. It did not ask them whether they found it more important that the lawyer knew the law, as compared to handling the initial conversation effectively.

Analyzing a study of big-firm clients in the U.S. and similar studies in Australia, Professor Clark Cunningham’s paper “What Do Clients Want” delved deeper into the causes of client satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In these studies, the comparative importance of competence appears to be more complicated (emphasis added here):

Many lawyers equate client satisfaction with the outcome achieved; however, studies over the past three decades in three different countries has produced impressive evidence that clients evaluate their lawyers’ competence more in terms of the process experienced by them in the representation than the outcome.

It seems clients see competence as necessary but not sufficient for client satisfaction. Competence is the baseline, and something else is what makes the difference in client satisfaction or dissatisfaction. What is that something else?

Although there was widespread client satisfaction with the specialists’ legal knowledge and skills [in the Australian study of clients], the evaluators also found “consistent evidence of client dissatisfaction with the provision of services, and the quality of the service-delivery process.” According to this study (emphasis added):

Practitioners are concentrating on developing their knowledge and skills to deliver better outcomes; but their clients, expecting both technical competence and results, are being disappointed by the process of getting there. Clients complained about the quality of their lawyers’ services in terms of inaccessibility, lack of communication, lack of empathy and understanding, and lack of respect . . . .

The original idea for this post was to write about the “emotional labor” lawyers perform for their clients and others. Emotional labor means, basically, showing up and being constructive even when it’s difficult: “the effort it takes to keep your professional game face on when what you’re doing is not concordant with how you feel.”  Does a lawyer’s performance of emotional labor make the client “love” the lawyer more?

That question led to the more basic question of what motivates client satisfaction, which led to this overview of the studies above. (There must be more information; please direct my attention to additional good data on client satisfaction.) And the overview here suggests it will be worthwhile to explore emotional labor in more depth in a future post. Emotional labor does seem connected to accessibility, open communication, empathy, and respect.

Feedback would be welcome on clients “loving” their lawyers, client satisfaction generally, and the idea of lawyers performing emotional labor for clients, colleagues, and others. Please share thoughts in the comments or on social media.

A Winning Approach to Negotiations: Self-Awareness, Flexibility, and Practice

Jennifer Romig1 Comment

lee-headshot-2-1Guest post by Katrina June Lee, Associate Clinical Professor, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law

On September 21, the Moritz College of Law hosted the incomparable Marya Cody Kolman as its 2016 Lawrence Lecturer, named in honor of lawyer and law school educator James K. L. Lawrence (Moritz ‘65).

A Yale Law grad, Kolman is a long-time adjunct professor of negotiations and coach for The Ohio State University’s ABA mediation advocacy team. For more than 30 years, Kolman has helped train OSU law students to be, in her words, “high-quality ethical representatives.” Kolman’s full-time day job, since 1999, is Director of Mediation Services at Franklin County Domestic Relations Court in Columbus, Ohio.

In giving this year’s Lawrence Lecture, Kolman drew from her deep negotiations experience. The Lecture took place in the law school’s large auditorium and was attended by students, professors, and practitioners.

Kolman’s main theme for aspiring effective negotiators could be summed up as follows: reflect on and identify your own negotiating tendencies, build into your repertoire styles that do not come naturally to you, and practice so that you can adapt to any type of negotiating situation.

She started the lecture with a very telling story that revealed her main theme.  Over the years, as a coach for OSU’s ABA mediation advocacy student team, Kolman noticed that OSU’s team regularly beat teams that had practiced for months and months (sometimes years). Yes, OSU law students were (in Kolman’s words) “simply amazing” and benefited from education in an outstanding law school dispute resolution program. Still, Kolman wondered if there was something about their competition preparation that made OSU law students especially effective.

A winning approach

After some reflection and investigation, Kolman discovered that the OSU teams benefited from not being scripted and not being coached to follow a fixed protocol. Kolman learned that some law schools tried to script the roles for their students or require that they negotiate in a certain way. This approach to preparation differed significantly from Kolman’s approach.

Kolman described the OSU team approach, which emphasized self-awareness and flexibility. Coaches first watched the students and observed their negotiation styles. The coaches noted the students’ strengths and challenges as negotiators. They then helped the students build on their own style and be more effective negotiators using existing strengths. This approach proved to be much more effective than giving students a script or a fixed protocol on how to negotiate.

OSU team coaches had identified a winning approach. The approach focused on developing self-awareness about students’ “natural” negotiation styles and tendencies, and helping students build on their strengths and develop the ability to use other styles when situations called for them.

Raw talent is not enough. Be prepared.

Kolman emphasized that “raw talent” is not enough to be a successful negotiator. Lawyers need to learn about different styles and skills and practice them. Only through that exploration and practice can a lawyer learn what works best for him or her. Kolman coached the audience: Develop strengths and expand on them. Avoid “forcing yourself into a style that does not work for you.”

Even though everyone has negotiated before law school, whether at the grocery store or with family members at home, Kolman cautioned, lawyers should not enter negotiations without training, forethought, and preparation. As I tell my negotiations students, preparation is key.

When Kolman practiced law as a domestic relations attorney, she negotiated with opposing counsel on a daily basis, with 95 percent of cases settling before trial. Most opposing counsel were well-prepared, but some were not. Those who were not would come into the negotiation and start flipping through their files trying to figure out what was going on in the case. Not surprisingly, in those instances, Kolman was usually able to negotiate a very favorable settlement for her client.

Steps to effective negotiating

Kolman offered these steps for any law student or lawyer to become a better negotiator:

Analyze your personal negotiation style and preferences.

One place to start is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode instrument. For a price, a person can assess which conflict-handling modes he or she is overusing or underusing. The five conflict-handling modes are competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating. Kolman noted that, without paying for the T-K Conflict Mode Instrument, you can still assess your conflict-mode tendencies through honest hard reflection.

“Think about what’s you” and work on styles that are “not you.”

Once a person has identified personal preferences and tendencies, Kolman urged audience members to “think about what’s you,” maximize your own tendencies, and work on other styles that may not come naturally. Bringing together the strengths of “natural tendencies” and an ability to use other styles as needed will help a lawyer become a well-rounded negotiator. For example, the lawyer who naturally tends to use an accommodating style will find it helpful to learn how to use a competing style so he or she can use it when needed.

Learn about different negotiation styles and practice.

Training and practice help build effective negotiation skills. Kolman commented that “the beauty of a negotiation class” is that “you can try things out.”

Always be willing to learn the interests of your client and the other party.

Kolman emphasized the importance of learning the interests of a client and the other side. This can help with problem-solving and collaborating to find a solution that all parties are happy with. In our negotiations courses at OSU Moritz College of Law, students learn skills that help with exploring interests, including active listening, asking helpful questions, and achieving an optimal balance of empathy and assertiveness in a negotiation.

Kolman encouraged all aspiring negotiators to work on being more self-aware about personal tendencies, understand that raw talent is usually not enough to be an effective negotiator, and to practice styles that do not come naturally.

After reading this post, consider what your personal style is in handling conflict, and try a different one.

 

Sources cited in the 2016 Lawrence Lecture (arranged alphabetically here):

Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes, 2nd Ed. (Penguin Books 1991).

Gary Goodpaster, A Primer on Competitive Bargaining, 1996 J. Disp. Resol. 325.

Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Toward Another View of Legal Negotiation: The Structure of Problem Solving, 31 UCLA Law Review 754 (1984).

Robert H. Mnookin, et al., Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes (Belknap Press 2000).

Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Shattering Negotiation Myths: Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Negotiation Style, 7 Harv. Negot. L. Rev. 143 (2002).

Richard Shell, Bargaining Styles and Negotiation, 17 Neg. J. 155 (2001).

Listen Like a Lawyer is grateful for this post by Katrina June Lee, Associate Clinical Professor and a member of the Dispute Resolution faculty at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where she teaches Legal Negotiations and Settlements. Moritz’s DR program is No. 1 in the 2017 U.S. News & World Reports ranking of law school DR programs. Professor Lee notes her thanks to Marya Kolman for her insightful Lecture and for sharing her notes and slides for use as background for this post, and to Professor Ellen Deason for her review and comments on this post.

 

Categories of listening

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Katrina Lee from Ohio State tweeted earlier this week:

The article referred to in her tweet is by  Jim Lovelace, Director of Talent Development at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, and was published in the ABA Law Practice Today.

As Katrina said, it is a quick read. And it’s a pretty powerful read, too. The essential premise is that to be effective, a listener must move beyond “self-focused listening.” What does that mean?

In my 25 years of experience as a practicing lawyer and legal career development professional, I have observed that lawyers spend the vast majority of their work time—when they are not talking, that is—as self-focused listeners. When they hear others’ stories, their minds are occupied with: What are the flaws and where are the potential liabilities? Where is the “good stuff” on which I can build a case? They dig for facts, often asking for more information to construct their narratives and theories. This is not surprising. This is what lawyers have been taught, from law school onward, to do.

But there’s more to listening than this self-focused approach. Lovelace introduces empathic listening and comprehensive listening, two other categories of listening that may not be right for a contentious deposition but are very, very right for interpersonal situations at work. Lovelace uses a hypothetical in which a trusted senior associate blindsides the senior partner by announcing he’s leaving the firm. Different listening methods can affect not just the tone but the outcome of such conversations.

Lawyers love categories, and somebody this blog will have a pull-down menu listing the many categories of listening that communications experts have identified. When it comes to (1) self-focused listening, (2) empathetic listening, and (3) comprehensive listening, Lovelace’s article is an excellent introductory resource. It doesn’t take long to read, and it’s really good. Thanks for the tweet recommending the article, Katrina!

Learning styles, revisited

Jennifer Romig

For the past month, I’ve been struggling with an ankle injury. Yesterday at the orthopedist’s office, the medical questionnaire asked about patients’ preferred learning style. The question was something like this:

Screen Shot 2016-08-03 at 8.21.06 AM

My answer was and remains, “ I don’t care how you give me the information as long as you fix my ankle!”

And that connects to a post from last year, “Back to school means ‘what’s your learning style?’” That post points out that learning styles are better thought of as learning preferences by individuals. It cites some research and analysis questioning whether teaching to an individual’s preferred learning style actually enhances their learning outcomes. In other words, it’s not clear that teaching to learning styles helps people actually learn.

The consensus at least among learning-style skeptics is this: learning-style preferences do not mean information actually is more effective when packaged to meet any one person’s preference. A learner may prefer to learn visually, but certain lessons about music must be presented in auditory format. A learner may prefer to learn by acting and moving, but certain math concepts must be presented visually in a formula. For physical therapy, learning by doing makes a lot of sense so you can model the right way to do the exercises. The basic takeaway is this:

The nature of the information is the most significant factor in how that information should be presented to learners.

This is an important point for those who care about good listening skills. With the popularity of texting and email and other screen-based forms of communication, comfort with and preferences for listening and face-to-face conversations would seem to be in jeopardy. Future lawyers should not use their exposure to learning styles to say, “I’m going to text the client this bad news instead of calling her because I prefer to get information in writing and visually.”

As I wrote last year, many people have written really good articles about using learning styles in the law-school classroom. And none of this is to excuse a decision by a professor to always use the Socratic method or any other default method. But it is worthwhile to question what seems to be the very popular belief that people learn information effectively when it is reshaped to fit their preferences.

What lawyers say, and what they actually do

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

How do lawyers transfer their knowledge? Lawyering scholars have been talking about “tacit knowledge” since the early 1990s. A recent ABA publication encouraged law students to use their externships and other practical experiences to interact with lawyers and try to glean some of that tacit knowledge via “extensive personal contact, regular interaction, and trust.” I touched on tacit knowledge in an early-summer blog post encouraging summer associates to talk with experienced lawyers about their work and to closely observe their nonverbal signals during these conversations.

This advice suggested perhaps the slightest hint of the idea that there might be dissonance in what lawyers say they do and what they actually do. An article by one of my law-professor heroes, Richard Neumann, Jr. explores this concept in depth.  The article is Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner, and the Comparative Failures of Legal Education, 6 Clinical L. Rev. 401 (2000). It attacks superficial notions of lawyering and legal education at multiple levels.

What is the difference between what lawyers say they do and what they actually do? The real tacit knowledge is in what they actually do—which they may not be willing to describe or even fully aware of.

This insight is from the work of Donald Schön, a now-deceased professor of architecture at MIT. Schon’s ideas and Neumann’s exploration of them aren’t new, but the insights remain relevant and helpful.

Schön sought a deeper understand of tacit knowledge, questioning its foundations:

[T]acit knowledge is not necessarily accurate knowledge. Because it is tacit, it is also unexamined.

And because it is unexamined, it may be worthy of the term “knowledge” only in sarcastic quote marks:

The tacit ‘knowledge’ of an ineffective professional might be nothing more than superstition—and correspondingly dangerous to clients.

Schön questioned professionals’ capacity to understand and describe their own work. What professionals think they do and what they actually do are often entirely different. Here he used two terms to categorize false and real tacit knowledge. (Neumann, while clearly a fan of Schön’s work, didn’t really like his terminology, and here you may feel a particularly strong urge to close this browser window. But consider plowing on.) Schön’s terms distinguish what a professional says about the work from how the professional actually does the work:

  • A “theory of action” is how a person describes the work they do.
  • A “theory-in-use” is what actually governs the person’s actions.

As a result, we can only learn a person’s true “theory-in-use” by observing their behavior. More broadly, this discrepancy “makes it harder to improve how professionals work.” A lawyer might resist making a change out of the mistaken belief about what she is actually doing. “Because our theory of action seems satisfactory to us, we do not see any reason to change.”

And willingness to change isn’t necessarily sufficient to make a real change. “[E]ven if we can be persuaded to change, we might be satisfied” just by changing our theory of action. This is a change in name only if “we continue what we were doing before because our theory-in-use remains unexamined and controls our actions.”

I’ve thought about this concept with legal writing, and writing generally. It’s much easier to change one’s nominal theory of action, especially if that means adopting new writing software or formats or labels about what one is doing. In an article titled Fighting “Tippism,” Stephen Armstrong and Timothy Terrell wrote about how superficial writing “tips” are no substitute for the real work of learning and using the lessons of rhetoric, logic, and cognitive psychology.

In the realm of listening, the problems equally difficult if not more so because listening is so difficult to observe and measure. One may have a theory of action that they are in fact a great listener and an active listener. They are totally on board with the value of listening.

But their theory-in-use could be quite different. How well someone listens can be described in three major categories, according to Melissa Daimler, Head of Learning and Organizational Development at Twitter, writing for the Harvard Business Review Blog:

Internal listening is focused on your own thoughts, worries, and priorities, even as you pretend you’re focusing on the other person.

Focused listening is being able to focus on the other person, but you’re still not connecting fully to them. The phone may be down and you may be nodding in agreement, but you may not be picking up on the small nuances the person is sharing. 

360 listening.  You’re not only listening to what the person is saying, but how they’re saying it — and, even better, what they’re not saying, like when they get energized about certain topics or when they pause and talk around others.

A lawyer may believe he is a 360 listener, when in fact he is an obstinately internal listener. This mismatch of belief means the lawyer does not feel any need to work on listening because how can you improve upon something already pretty terrific?

And if such a lawyer does read a blog post or attend a training on listening, she might pick up a new term of art for listening, such as “I’m a 360 listener,” while remaining rather poor at it.  This obviously connects to the Dunning-Kruger effect of being so bad at something that you don’t even know you’re bad.

Schön and a collaborator apparently tried to address this difficulty through seminars and training that guided participants to confront the differences between their theories of action and theories-in-use. They sought to help professionals recognize two major approaches to going about professional work:

  • Model I exhibits “highly developed rationality and a commitment to goals and winning.”
  • Model II “develops the largest amount of valid and relevant information and generates the largest number of options from which to choose.”

Model I sounds a lot like a stereotypical lawyer personality. That’s not good news. Model I—also known by Robert Condlin’s term “persuasion mode”—has a lot of problems. Persuasion mode is sometimes useful and beneficial, but as a default personality it has some significant pitfalls, as described in Neumann’s article:

[A] person in persuasion mode tends to act on hidden agendas and strategies; “to minimize self-analysis and to reserve it for private moments when it will not weaken instrumental effectiveness”; and to argue in ways that are subtle but “needlessly stylized and hyperbolic.” Persuasion-mode behavior is profitable in situations where the struggle is for control rather than insight, and where the “self-sealing properties of persuasion mode habits” minimize tentativeness and perplexity. “Persuasion-mode habits predispose lawyers to take evaluative stands automatically” so that they “make statements that, on reflection, they know to be false.” “It causes one to impute rather than explore others’ ends, shut off rather than encourage legitimate objection, . . . and accumulate rather than share decision-making authority.

The other possibility is the learning mode, also known as the inquiring mode. Neumann’s essay on Schön explores how the inquiring mode is more consistent with curiosity, open-ended thinking, and exploration of ideas regardless of consequences. A number of benefits accrue to clients and lawyers, with more meaningful and effective collaboration at the top of the list. The collaboration is better in at least two ways: First, the lawyer does not have to maintain a “professional façade” of being the expert. “The ‘expert’ will want “deference and status in the client’s response to [the] professional persona,” while the reflective practitioner will prefer a ‘sense of freedom and of real connection to the client.’”  At the same time, a client may feel more comfortable with a lawyer in persuading mode because the client can sit back and rely on the assumption the lawyer is the expert and will do everything right. A more reflective lawyer can create a more reflective relationship with the client. In these relationships, lawyer and client “join” in making sense of the case. The client gains “a sense of increased involvement and action.”

With the inquiring mode, lawyer-client collaboration is better in at least two ways: First, the lawyer does not have to maintain a “professional façade” of being the expert. “The ‘expert’ will want “deference and status in the client’s response to [the] professional persona,” while the reflective practitioner will prefer a ‘sense of freedom and of real connection to the client.’” At the same time, a client may feel more comfortable with an “expert” lawyer in persuading mode because the client desires the comfort of passive reliance. A more reflective lawyer can in turn create a more reflective relationship with the client in which lawyer and client “join . . . in making sense of the case.” The client gains “a sense of increased involvement and action.”

Neumann’s review of Schön’s work ends on an extended exploration of how difficult it is to teach any of this in a formal curriculum—especially the curricula of medical and law school as distinct from the arts and architecture. Teaching reflection and modeling it in experiential classes are crucial. One way to start is simply by sharing with law students and lawyers Schön’s essential and upsetting insight that the way we intuitively explain what we do may not be very accurate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teamwork for lawyers

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

The thing I’ve most wanted to share here in recent months has been “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” published in the New York Times Magazine’s recent Work Issue. Building perfect teams—or at least more effective ones—is pretty important for the legal profession. For law firms, the complexity of many legal matters demands collaborative work. Yet client teams—and other types of teams such as deal teams and trial teams—are more likely to fail without a good understanding of team dynamics. And “law students baulk at the idea of group work.”

 

To understand why some of its teams performed better than others, Google launched a large study. At first no patterns emerged. Eventually, the key issue was something a bit more abstract than any specific metric. The issue was “group norms”:

Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.

The impact of group norms on team performance was critical. It could make a team of individually “average” performers out-perform other groups. And it could make a team of individual rock stars perform poorly.

So if effective teams could be built upon consensus of any type—either to argue all the time or to build consensus all the time—then is there really any content to the idea of effective group norms? Actually, yes. The Google study found two common traits of good teams. This is where listening comes in:

Actually, yes. The Google study found two common traits of good teams. This is where listening comes in:

First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.

The broader impact of these two traits is that team members felt “psychological safety.” The New York Times article cited a study by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson describing psychological safety as “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

This article and the concepts it describes should, in my view, be required reading for any law school activity based on teams. It seems like a pretty good idea for law-firm managers as well. The lead researcher on Google’s Project Aristotle study became interested in the topic while attending graduate business school. She had one team that didn’t click, didn’t exactly fail but also didn’t prosper, and didn’t stick together for future projects. And she had another team that clicked and succeeded in competitive environments even though the group dynamics didn’t feel internally competitive.

Law students who’ve done any sort of group work and lawyers working collaboratively have similar stories. This article helps to explain why these teams end up the way they do. And it begins to address even more difficult questions about taking steps to create effective team dynamics from the outset and to make existing teams more effective.

Habits of cross-cultural lawyering

Jennifer Romig2 Comments

What if a lawyer from a modest financial background is working with relatively wealthy clients for the first time? What if a commercial litigator at a large firm takes on a pro bono project interviewing kids in juvenile detention? What if a young female lawyer is representing an international client with a serious legal problem and a seriously sexist attitude?

These are just a few examples drawn from my own experience. The common thread is cross-cultural competence. One might also call it cross-cultural literacy or cultural consciousness or simply cross-cultural lawyering. Whatever you call it, it’s a really big topic.

The culturally competent lawyer is one who can work—effectively—with clients, co-workers, judges, and people in general from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

There’s no such thing as “culture-neutral” lawyering; debunking that claim is a beginning point in the landmark 2001 publication of Susan Bryant’s Five Habits: Building Cross-Cultural Competence in Lawyers. Differences in cultural backgrounds affect many aspects of the lawyer’s role, even as seemingly simple a lawyer’s request to a client that the client ask for clarification if the client doesn’t understand something or the lawyer is not being clear. Those two different ways of phrasing the request may generate different reactions—or what seems like non-cooperation—depending on the client’s background. Cultural competence connects with core professionalism requirements such as competence and communications, as this Oregon Bar article points out. Lack of cultural competence could also cost a firm in terms of employee and client retention.

In this post, I will briefly summarize the “five habits” framework developed by Bryant and Peters. (They refer to teaching law students, so that is the terminology used below, but obviously the concepts are meant to apply far beyond the walls of any law school class.) At various times this year, the blog will highlight related articles, ideas, and practical recommendations.

Habits One and Two

The beginning of the five habits requires thinking about similarities and differences with clients—not just what those similarities and differences are, but how the process of thinking about them affects the relationship and the law student’s effectiveness. How can a law student find similarities with a client from a very different background? What if a law student identifies as so similar to a client that she misses other important differences?

More broadly for analyzing and managing the client’s case, how do the similarities and differences affect interactions between the client, law student, and judge (or other decision-maker)? How strong is the client’s legal claim, and can the law student shape the legal argument to encompass more of the client’s claim and situation?

Habit Three

When a law student and client come from different backgrounds, the student may miss what the client is intending to communicate. And nothing hurts communication more than the illusion it has taken place (said George Bernard Shaw). The student may believe the interaction is productive when in fact the student is negatively judging the client. Maybe the client even senses that judgment and withholds information accordingly. Maybe the lawyer later finds out that the client has in fact not shared all the relevant information.

Part of the cure for these problems is “parallel universe” thinking in which the student looks for multiple interpretations of the facts. The point is to reach a deeper, less judgmental understanding of the client’s perspective and actions.

Habit Four

Communication is a huge part of cross-cultural competence. Thus, students should think about “pitfalls and red flags.” One pitfall is the problem of “scripts.” Scripts are habitual templates lawyers may use in repeated situations. Rather than using scripts, students are encouraged to bring out the client’s own story with attentive listening and to gauge the client’s own sense of engagement and understanding. (Here I will note the connection to Ken Grady’s exploration of how lawyers are prone to rely on mental shortcuts just as much as non-lawyers.)

Red flags would include signs that real communication is actually not taking place, such as a client who tries to dominate a conversation or another one who withdraws and takes no notes. Law students have to overcome their sensitivity and move past communication challenges; they need a “broad repertoire” of communication skills for gauging clients’ understanding.

Habit Five

The final habit is the most difficult, which is why Bryant and Peters place it last. It asks students to confront their own biases and stereotypes, an uncomfortable process to say the least. To develop this habit, students can “create settings in which bias and stereotype are less likely to govern.” Because people are more affected with bias when they are under stress, Bryant and Peters encourage law professors and students to proactively address stress. Professors can “promote reflection and change of perspectives with a goal of eliminating bias.”

Communication skills are critical

Communication skills run throughout the habits. For example, “remaining present with the individual client is an essential part of cross-cultural competence.” More specifically, good cross-cultural lawyers have to be good listeners:

Intercultural communication skills include deep listening skills and capacities to focus on content rather than style, the ability to read verbal and non-verbal behavior, and the ability to adapt conversation management behaviors and style. These are communication skills that lawyers need in every situation and more so in cross-cultural situations.

The original Five Habits paper is now 15 years old. Bryant and Peters have collected a wealth of materials here at LegalED, including resources on listening.  The discussion of cross-cultural lawyering has continued vigorously, with a recent burst of work on implicit bias.

In this blog’s continuing exploration of additional articles, ideas, and recommendations, the goal will be what Ascanio Piomelli wrote in 2006, surveying the field of teaching about cross-cultural lawyering:

[C]ross-cultural materials are at their best . . . when they spark generous curiosity, nurture engaged, nonjudgmental inquiry, and foster real connection with others.

 

What is listening? Q&A with Jennie Grau

Jennifer Romig1 Comment

One of the best things about writing this blog has been the opportunity to talk with and meet (in person, by phone, or by e-mail) a variety of communication experts. One of them is Jennie Grau, President of Grau Interpersonal Communications. Jennie has spent her career training, coaching, writing, and speaking, on the subject of listening. She is a Certified Listening Professional (CLP) of the International Listening Association. Although not an attorney, she is surrounded by attorneys in her family life. In her professional work, she has done a variety of trainings with lawyers and other legal professionals. Listen Like a Lawyer is grateful to Jennie Grau for responding to this Q&A.

What would you say are the classic concepts in listening?

Listening is thought of and explored from many perspectives. Musicians talk about listening in terms of entertainment, emotions, and aesthetics. Listening to music is a form of appreciative listening. While it may not seem pertinent to lawyers, there is a music of the voice which through tone, pace, pause, and quality communicates the emotional undercurrent of human interaction.

In legal contexts and in law school, listening is often thought of as a tool to support critical thinking and analysis. The focus is on critical listening, or reply style listening, to better advocate for a position.

Empathic listening, often associated with medical and therapeutic contexts, is equally important for dispute resolution. Empathic listening involves being able to understand and articulate another person’s perspective. If you can see the world through someone else’s eyes, you are better able to uncover viable solutions which result in more successful negotiations. In addition to dispute resolution, empathic listening is key to building rapport, loyalty, and trust, the foundations of good relationships with both clients and colleagues.

Mindfulness is another form of listening. It involves listening to oneself. Mindfulness can be thought of as the ability to still one’s own thoughts. It expands one’s awareness and ability to concentrate. The aggressive Type-A business personality may not intuitively embrace the idea of listening to self. The need to quiet the noise in our heads, to fully focus, to relinquish the speaker role, is essential for full understanding. Mindfulness is appreciated by the business community when it is recognized as a tool to accomplish their goals.

What package of listening skills do lawyers need?

Stephen R. Covey observed that “most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” In fact, one of the skills of advocacy is “listening to reply.” Listening to reply is important because lawyers have to give advice, set an agenda, evaluate, and at times rebut.

But there is a complementary other half of that famous statement—the listening to understand. That second set of skills, inquiry, comprehending, supporting and uniting, is important because the courtroom is not the only legal context where listening happens. In these additional contexts understanding the other party is a powerful skill.

Think about who is encouraged to go to law school. If you are good at debate and rhetoric, people say, “You should be a lawyer!” But if you are a brilliant listener and can understand the human condition, no one says that. They say, “You should be a social worker or psychologist or go into business.”

Among this second set of skills, lawyers need the skill of inquiry. That’s different from interrogation. Inquiry sustains rapport during an interaction while uncovering new information. Lawyers also need skills that demonstrate comprehension such as paraphrasing what was said and sometimes what is not said overtly but implied such as the feelings, needs, and interests of the speaker.

Lawyers also need the skill of unifying parties’ discrepant interests. For example, in a gritty and messy divorce, lawyers benefit from the skill of keeping people at the table and working through the issues. In dealing with family conflict, the lawyer may need to listen through years of emotions and relationship issues. In listening to what lies below the objective statement, the lawyer can recognize possible solutions by understanding what is important to each party.

Why is it important to develop those deeper listening skills?

 Because there are so many benefits, for both tasks and relationships, when you listen deeply. Real listening means getting to a shared understanding between speaker and listener. Without that, we lose vast amounts of data that could help solve problems and resolve conflicts. Deep listening is worth the effort.

How do you know if you are good or bad at listening?

The short answer is you ask key people in your life for feedback: your colleagues, your family, and your friends. Our own perception of our listening skills is usually inaccurate. Ask questions like:

  • Do I focus on you and what you are saying when you want my attention?
  • Do I seem to understand what you mean rather than what I would mean if I had said the same thing?
  • Do I remember what you tell me?
  • Do you feel like I really listen to you?

Most people’s listening is unskilled. We rarely teach this in schools, and we are blind to the fact we are unskilled. Prior to my seminars, I ask people to rate how skillful they are as listeners. On average I get a rating of 80%. After the seminar I ask again. They laugh and tell me they did not know how much they did not know.

What is your advice for lawyers and other legal professionals?

Assume there is more than you are getting

When you are listening begin with the assumption that what you understand may not be accurate or complete. Create opportunities to explore a conversation more fully: “What did you mean?” “Tell me more.” “How does that work?” The beginning of listening is recognizing how likely you are to have misunderstood what the other person meant.

Appreciate the power of the pause

It may seem like a speaker is finished. They may use downward inflection in their speech and break eye contact but still have more to say. A listener can use the pause: count to ten and do a full inhale and exhale before going on or even asking a follow up. You will be surprised to discover how often more will come. This is particularly true when you are listening to someone speaking in a language other than their first language.

Try “the five why’s”

This means asking “why” five times. This practice comes from the world of engineering. The theory is that the first time someone answers a question about “why,” their answer is probably superficial. Going beyond the first answer allows the speaker to find the root cause and gives them more time to connect ideas that they had not connected before. This technique is especially effective if you don’t use the word “why” which can cause people to feel defensive. Instead ask a “why question” saying “How come?” “What caused that?” or “What lead to that?”

What else?

Use this technique when you believe everything has been said and you are effectively done with the discussion. Questions such as “Is there anything else?” and “What else should we be talking about?” often elicit new information. It is shocking how often people will add new and often critical content at this time. There is a parallel in the medical field, “the door knob moment” when the doctor is about to leave the exam room and the patient shares new and important health information.

Build the listening container with your non-verbal presence

The way listeners use their face, eyes, body, posture, gesture and voice create a context for interaction. Your non-verbal presence can put people at ease or make them more guarded. People often enter a lawyer’s office with anxiety. They may not be happy to be there. They may be worried about the cost or the outcome. Many people are uncomfortable with conflict. It’s an unfamiliar setting and alien experience. In this context, listening is extremely important for building trust with new clients and ensuring existing clients follow your advice. It is a way for you to develop respect.

This Q&A has been condensed and edited for brevity.

Listen Like a Lawyer is currently working with Jennie Grau and several other lawyers/mediators/Certified Listening Professionals on a possible CLE session in Tucson, Arizona, in March 2016. More information will be forthcoming on the blog when details are more certain.