Category: People skills

Core professional qualities of lawyers

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

About a thousand law professors are gathering now at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Schools. The first session I attended this morning was Incorporating Teaching Professional Identity into the Legal Education Curriculum, with speakers from Mercer Law School and the University of North Dakota School of Law. Both schools offer innovative courses in building a professional identity as a lawyer.

The new program on professional identity at North Dakota emphasizes twelve core professional qualities, which I quote here from their handout:

  • Adaptability/Deals with Unpredictability
  • Confronts Mistakes
  • Courage
  • Diligence/Reliability
  • Empathy/Compassion
  • Generosity/Public-Mindedness
  • Honesty
  • Humility/Respectfulness/Courtesy
  • Integrity Under Pressure
  • Loyalty
  • Patience/Perseverance/Resilience
  • Professional Objectivity/Sympathetic Detachment

I really love this list and wanted to focus the rest of this post on how listening relates to these core qualities. Interestingly, the list does not include anything about “communicates effectively.” I think the point is to talk about the essential character of the lawyer, which is separate and broader than the lawyer’s discrete skills like communicating effectively. The lawyer’s core qualities are broader and more significant than any one skill; they drive the lawyer’s individual actions and deployment of skills in many ways.

Here are my quick thoughts on highlights of the list in relation to listening.

Adaptability and Dealing with Unpredictability

To be able to adapt, the lawyer has to listen. This is easier at the beginning of a project, when the lawyer is beginning to create the narrative of the case or the strategic approach. It’s harder when the client and/or lawyer already have a narrative or strategy in mind. The best lawyers can hear explicit or implicit dissonance with their chosen narrative, and then assess the risk to that narrative.

Listening also helps with unpredictability, I think in the sense of asking questions and listening to the answer. Open-ended questions may tease out that unpredictability and let a lawyer prepare for it. Closed questions that lead the conversation in a certain way may mask unpredictable facts or preferences, setting up nasty surprises later.

Courage

Lawyers have to deal with very difficult facts sometimes. The setting may be a courtroom where a witness recounts painful testimony or a law office where a client shares an uncomfortable truth or a mediation room where harsh words are exchanged or an icy test of wills becomes apparent. The lawyer has to have courage to face these situations and listen with professional body language and a problem-solving demeanor, even if that lawyer’s personal preference would be to go anywhere else in the world.

Diligence

To do a thorough job, the lawyer has to set up sufficient time for fact-investigation including, possibly, interviews. And the lawyer should use judgment to decide how to go about collecting facts, whether by e-mail or phone or face-to-face meetings.

Empathy/Compassion

Listening like a vacuum cleaner sucking up information is not, by itself, effective listening. The listener may be primarily interested in fact investigation and analysis, but listening with empathy will almost always be more professional (as a value) as well as more effective (as a skill).

Generosity

Giving time to listen is a form of generosity. Giving undivided attention during that time is more difficult and therefore more generous.

Humility/Respectfulness/Courtesy

Effective listening is all of these things. We’ve all witnessed situations with a bad listener who interrupts to ensure everyone gets the benefit of his or her “wisdom.” Interrupting is a little more complicated than that, though, because some forms of interruption show engagement with the conversation. Effective listening, like professional identity more broadly as discussed in this session, is complex and holistic and cannot be wholly addressed by a set of steps or distinct, invariable behavior rules.

Patience

At times, listening is hard. That’s partly because people speak more slowly than our brains want to process information. (A whole separate blog post or posts will cover this idea later. It’s a huge component of why really effective listening can be so hard.) Effective listeners may need to show explicit signs of patience, such as body language and encouraging responses. Effective listeners may also need to struggle with their own intrinsic impatience due to the differential between how fast they hear the information and how fast they are capable of processing information.

Perseverance

Many people have mentioned to me that the best listeners are able to hear what’s not said. That’s partly an intellectual skill. But perseverance helps–asking questions in different ways, listening with discernment to how a person says something, and defining the gap. That’s just one specific point where perseverance and listening intersect. Being able to withstand a 4-hour conference call is another form of perseverance.

Professional Objectivity and Sympathetic Detachment

Effective listening means limiting the influence of one’s preferences and biases. It means being empathetic while not becoming so wrapped up in the narrative that one’s objectivity is compromised. The lawyer’s role is a complex and difficult one, and the seeming paradox of “sympathetic detachment” is just one illustration of the fine line lawyers must walk.

Please feel free to use the comments for sharing more thoughts on listening and how it relates to the core qualities of lawyering.

Thanks again to Professors Patti Alleva and Michael McGinniss of the University of North Dakota and Professors Tim Floyd and Patrick Longan, and Dean Daisy Hurst Floyd of Mercer. I probably won’t be able to blog in this depth again during the conference but will try to at least tweet further thoughts of interest on listening. Listen Like a Lawyer’s Twitter feed can be seen here on the blog on the right-hand panel.

Resolve to do more than “active listening”

Jennifer Romig2 Comments

Lawyers are not stupid. They know that listening is important to their professional success. In fact, when a recent study asked about 100 U.S. and Finnish lawyers to assess their own “listening competence,” they answered realistically, ranking themselves average to good. They supported these rankings with qualitative answers so closely linked to their work as lawyers that the authors of the study concluded they were really answering a different question focused on their “professional listening competence.” The study is Professional Listening Competence: Promoting Well-Being at Work in the Legal Context by Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa and Pekka Isotalus, published in the International Journal of Listening.

The study by Ala-Kortesmaa and Isotalus is quite interesting and will be addressed in a longer post later in 2015. For now, here at the end of 2014, it offers a gem to take away as a potential New Year’s Resolution:

Active listening is the wrong answer. Or at least it’s not always the right answer.

Listening competence requires a broad range of skills from cognitive strengths such as memory to emotional (“affective”) strengths such as being able to focus on the conversation partner. And listening competence requires the listener to adjust behavior to the situation, using a variety of approaches.

People—including lawyers—generally do understand that they need to adjust their listening to the situation. The problem is the widespread belief that the way to do this is by active listening.

Active listening is focused on other conversation partners, with the goals of “adopting the emotions of others or interpreting their thoughts and meanings.” (This language is from the Ala-Kortesmaa article; the original source of this critique is by John Stewart and Milt Thomas, summarized here.)

What is often more effective is “dialogic listening.” Dialogic listening focuses on the shared aspect of the conversation. It explores what the other person is saying, not to crawl inside that person’s mind or try to paraphrase meaning but rather to create shared understanding. It’s more open-ended. It tends to be less manipulative. According to the original source on dialogic listening, Stewart and Thomas, the practice of dialogic listening means encouraging conversation partners to say more, using metaphors to reach new understandings, asking the conversation partner to paraphrase (rather than paraphrasing for them), and exploring the context behind the conversation partner’s statements.

One difficulty for attorneys that Ala-Kortesmaa and Isotalus point out is to find out if their conversation partner is communicating dialogically. This is the idea of the dual role of listening. The article implies what most attorneys will have experienced: sometimes they have to communicate with people who aren’t communicating in anything close to good faith. Or, it’s hard to communicate openly and non-manipulatively with someone who is trying to manipulatively guide the conversation toward his or her own goal. (Stewart and Thomas admit that dialogic listening itself can seem manipulative. So that goes back to the idea that however one labels communication, if it’s not good-faith communication then the labels really don’t matter.)

Throughout my time blogging here at Listen Like a Lawyer, I’ve been wanting to take a hard look at active listening. It is such a popular listening concept, yet there seems to be a subtle kind of domination in restating someone’s thoughts, either in the same words (now they are my words) or different words (let me fix that and put the right words on it). This topic needs further exploration because clearly active listening is a technique every lawyer does need, and great communicators can do active listening in good faith, without manipulation or domination.

But this insight from the Professional Listening Competence study seems like a great way to end the year. Active listening is not the formulaic answer to being a good listener. No single formula is the answer to being a good listener. Dialogic listening is worth learning more about, especially with client conversations, because it’s not about forcing meaning or extracting meaning but sharing meaning.

This New Year’s Eve post is inspired by Matt Homann’s “Looking for a Resolution?” post on the [non]billable hour. 

Holiday listening

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In the holiday season, listening to family and friends can be a perfect gift. It doesn’t cost money and it’s deeply meaningful for the recipient. For the giver, sitting down with a cup of coffee and a friend can be a respite from the hectic, distracted, too-many-things-to-do feeling that ushers in the season.

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Flickr/Rhett Sutphin

But making the listening happen, which requires cutting through that hecticness and the digital clutter of life (even on Thanksgiving), is hard. For lawyers, one somewhat natural method to help ourselves give the gift of listening is by asking questions. For that, I recommend the TED website’s list of “10 Questions to Ask Your Family Around the Table.” 

Questions like “What was the hardest moment of your life?” are pretty big questions. And that actually makes them really good for lawyers, almost 60 percent of whom are introverts. Writing about lawyer introverts in The Legal Balance, Beth Buelow defined an introvert as “a person who gains energy from solitude and drains energy during social interaction.” Introverts tend to enjoy deeper one-on-one conversations (as opposed to superficial group chit-chat) which is why TED’s 10 Questions are so helpful. In her article on lawyer-introverts, Buelow talked about networking but might as well have been describing holiday conversations with family:

[S]how up with your natural curiosity, sense of humor and ability to listen. We all want to be seen and heard, and you’re giving a tremendous gift to a prospect or colleague [LLL: or relative or friend] when you really listen and give her your undivided attention.

Happy holidays to Listen Like a Lawyer’s readers. May each of you give and receive the gift of listening this holiday season.

Listening on TV: What Sitcom Clips Can Teach Lawyers

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Thanks to unnamedTami K. Lefko for this fun and informative guest post.

I often use clips from television shows and movies in class, and there are a few related to active listening that I especially like. Here are three of my favorites, from three popular sitcoms:

1. Everybody Loves Raymond, “Father Knows Least”

This early episode of Everybody Loves Raymond largely focused on active listening. In the first part of the episode (“Part I” below), Debra forced Ray to attend a parenting class with her after their daughter Ally began misbehaving. Ray did not take the class seriously and did poorly when he was asked to role play with the instructor and demonstrate how he listens to their daughter.

(Part I – Ray demonstrates ineffective listening skills in parenting class)

But later in the episode (“Part 2”), he has a little more success using active listening techniques with his own parents. The most relevant part begins about 50 seconds into the “Part 2” clip and continues for about two minutes.

(Part II – Ray does better with his own parents)

One tangential aspect of this episode that I find interesting is that it also illustrates (and debunks) a common misperception about skills like writing and listening: that they can’t be taught. Those of us who teach legal writing and related skills have probably all heard, at one time or another, the objection that these skills cannot be taught: either you are a talented writer (or good listener) or not. In this episode, Ray initially objects to attending the parenting class. He agrees to attend, however, when he catches himself saying that his parents never took a class and they did a fine job — not exactly how he usually describes their parenting. Similarly, his parents tease him about taking a parenting class, but the techniques he learned in class are shown to work well to diffuse one of their arguments.

Credit: Season 2, Episode 2/Original Airdate: September 29, 1997

2. The Big Bang Theory, “The Extract Obliteration”

For a more recent example, I like this one from The Big Bang Theory. In the clip below, Sheldon and Leonard realize they are talking past each other rather than having a real conversation, so they try using a chess timer to give each other a chance to speak in turn.

The brief non-conversation that prompted Leonard to suggest using the chess timer is included in this longer clip, but it is of lesser quality than the clip above:

Although the use of the chess timer is played for laughs here, a chess timer or something similar could be used effectively in class for listening practice. Clients often complain that their lawyers do not truly listen to them, and law students can also find it difficult to listen, uninterrupted, to another’s story. Using a chess timer or similar device could make students aware if they tend to interrupt or pressure a speaker rather than listening patiently.

Credit: Season 6, Episode 6/Original Airdate: November 1, 2012

3. The Office, “The Whale”

In the episode linked below, Pam tries to teach Dwight how to appear interested in what other people have to say so that he can sell to female clients more effectively, without much success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg8PIK74KO4

Credit: Season 9, Episode 7/Original Airdate: November 15, 2012

All three of these episodes can be viewed in their entirety on Amazon Instant Video and similar services. If you have any favorites of your own on the listening topic, please mention them in the comments! I’d love to expand my repertoire of listening videos that are both entertaining and informative.

Empathy and communications with clients, spouses, and partners

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This week has seen several great posts on major issues for lawyers involving listening.

The first one was Jordan Furlong’s post “Don’t Think Like a Lawyer.” He argues that thinking like a lawyer is “easy and fun,” and also a dangerous replacement for thinking like a person. He argues that feeling like a client is totally lacking from legal education, and law students should be required to visit lawyers’ offices and experience what clients experience. “Legal education is a powerful drug; but if you’re not careful, it can drown out your instincts, stifle your emotions, and numb your heart.” To be great, lawyers must be more than “tacticians”; they must be “instinctive, heartfelt, caring, and real.”

These themes were addressed as well in Mark Perlmutter’s post on “6 Things We Learned in Law School that Shouldn’t Be Tried at Home” on Trebuchet Legal. Perlmutter recalls his shift from lawyer to counselor including his own experience in counseling: “I’ve come to realize how much my lawyer competencies had helped to make me an utterly incompetent husband.” Perlmutter explains some good therapy concepts boiled down to the idea that responding with opposition is not effective. Paraphrasing and building on the conversation may work a lot better. (That sounds a lot like active listening.)

These effect of these posts was encouraging for the project here at Listen Like a Lawyer. Upcoming content will explore some brass-tacks listening topics such as listening at deposition and listening at trial. If you’re a hard-core litigator and want to share some thoughts on listening, please let me know. On that note, here’s a nice article on listening at trial.

But this blog will continue to explore the soft skill of listening on its own terms — including its essential role in empathy, relationships, and human connections.

Coaching listening

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One way to become a better listener is to work with a coach. Just Google “listening coach” and you may be surprised by how many resources there are.

One coach who reached out to me is Laurie Schloff, Senior Coaching Partner with the Speech Improvement Company. She has worked with professionals including attorneys for more than 25 years, and (not surprisingly) believes that communication competence is essential to attorneys’ professional success. In one-on-one work, she uses this coaching framework:

  1. Assessing goals and developing a plan
  2. Individual or group sessions devoted to communication techniques and practice
  3. Application of skills in business situations, for example, running an important meeting or coaching a new associate
  4. Assessment of progress and future goals

Laurie provides various types of feedback, including her own personal feedback and video feedback. She also encourages attorneys to seek feedback from peers and to reflect and learn how to become their own coach (the concept of self-coaching).

Laurie coaches on all of the communication skills, but has some specific methods for helping attorneys improve their listening. She promotes the idea of “persuasive listening.” According to Laurie, persuasive listening means “conscious use of listening skills as a tool to build positive rapport, engagement and influence with others in your ‘communication world.’”

She encourages attorneys to think about listening in terms of the acronym “E.A.R.”:

  • Engage
  • Attend
  • Respond

For engaging, attorneys can do something they may feel very competent at, which is asking questions:

Attorneys can become stronger listeners by asking different types of questions depending on the situation. Laurie identified three particular types of questions to consider: “open,” “structured,” and “short reply.” An example of an open question is, “What are your thoughts about the training lawyers receive in listening skills?” An example of a structured question is, “What are some ways legal training could include listening skills practice?” An example of a short-reply question is, “Do you think lawyers are good listeners in general?”

For attending, the key issue is attention:

Attorneys can demonstrate attention to clients and colleagues by controlling distractions and multitasking. Employing positive behaviors are easy ways to convey attention, including occasional head nods and encouragers such as “uh huh” or “mhm.”  Laurie pointed out that verbal encouragers are especially necessary during phone conferences. In person, even when taking notes, attention should be on the client’s face as much as possible.

And for responding, again Laurie encourages attorneys to think of different types of responses:

The attorney may be responding to Information, for example by paraphrasing or summarizing before offering a fresh perspective: “So you’re looking to settle this by November.” The attorney may be responding to feeling. This means identifying the undercurrent of emotion if appropriate: “I sense a lot of stress around this last minute change in deadline.” The attorney may be responding to a goal. By this, Laurie means moving the client or colleague in a positive direction: “So you’d ideally like to look at possibilities for a national seminar in 2015.”

Laurie intertwines her coaching with hypothetical examples and anecdotes from her experience. On the value of listening, she shared a few words of wisdom from some of her contacts in the legal world:

  • Esther Dezube, a private practice attorney who specializes in personal injury:  “I listen to what is said and how it is said, starting from when the client walks in the door. If you don’t listen, you won’t be an effective trial lawyer.”
  • Tony Garcia Rivas, senior patent attorney at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals: “Attorneys may assume they know the problem and tune out. When I’m talking, I’m not learning.”

Cognitive diversity and listening skills

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This article, “How Cognitive Diversity Affects Your Work” from the ABA Law Practice Today is one of the best things I have read in quite some time about how lawyers and clients interact. The author, Anne Collier, explores a hypothetical legal team’s relationship with its client, where the CEO and general counsel have different cognitive styles and the lawyers on the legal team have different cognitive styles as well — not to mention the huge differences among the CEO and one of the lawyers on the team. These differences emerge from different approaches to the “paradox of structure” in solving problems: “The paradox of structure is the seemingly incongruous fact that structure both enables and limits one’s ability to solve a problem.” A group of professionals can all be operating at a very high level but still have different preferences for structure and innovation. Their differing preferences can lead to clashes in cognitive style. 

The article focuses on some (fascinating) metrics for problem-solving styles and never uses the word “listening.” Yet listening is part of the “bridging” and “coping” strategies it recommends for handling clashes of cognitive styles. My favorite line in the article, other than the one about the paradox of structure, is this example of a nonverbal bridging strategy: “Oscar agrees to give Madison ‘the look’ in meetings when she needs to be more concrete.”

Have you investigated your own cognitive style, or gotten informal or formal feedback on it? How do you use listening skills — including nonverbal signals — to perceive and anticipate problems stemming from cognitive diversity?

Listening to internal and external clients

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A friend recently sent me a nice compliment about the blog. She works in sales and marketing (not within the legal industry) and said she’s finding the listening skills discussed here very useful for communicating with both “internal and external customers.”

Courtesy Flickr/Elliott Brown
Courtesy Flickr/Elliott Brown

The focus on “internal and external customers” (or clients) caught my particular attention. Of course lawyers are going to want to listen intently to their external clients. One way to keep a client is to listen; conversely, a great way to lose a client — especially a senior business executive — is not to listen, such as by checking your smart phone during a meeting.

For lawyers, the idea of internal clients may be more subtle but still should be a given, especially for in-house lawyers and anyone who works in a place where client-service teams are chosen partly based on who the senior team leaders want to work with. Here’s a good post by Timothy Corcoran on better understanding your internal client. And here’s a good post with advice to associates on impressing partners — such as by treating them as an internal client.

But is effective listening different for lawyers’ internal and external clients, or should it be? Apart from what listening practices are most effective, as a descriptive matter might lawyers subconsciously listen differently in internal and external situations?

Active listening provides a focal point for exploring this question. Active listening has been defined by law professor John Barkai as “the lawyer’s verbal response that reflects back to the client, in different words, what the client has just said.”

Barkai suggests that we can evaluate active listening on at least three metrics:

  • accuracy: did the lawyer understand the speaker’s informational content and emotions?
  • intensity: did the lawyer understand the intensity of the speaker’s emotions?
  • form: did the lawyer respond with clean, simple paraphrasing — or did the lawyer use what Barkai views as potentially patronizing and unhelpful introductory phrases such as “I understand” and “What I’m hearing you say is . . .”? 

So with these metrics in mind, we can reflect on whether lawyers listen with different degrees of accuracy, attunement, and form when they are dealing with external versus internal clients. Here are two brief hypothetical case studies:

Lawyer #1 believes in the importance of listening and attempts to be a particularly strong listener with external clients. He focuses on their information and their content, and he accurately perceives the strength of their feelings. But he wants to show them how carefully he listens, and thus habitually and intentionally uses phrases such as “I understand” and “As I see it.”  Sometimes these phrases lead clients to feel a bit patronized, and as a result they may hold back. 

Lawyer #2 is at a stage of her career where she wants to show her technical lawyering skills to senior lawyers. She listens with a strong focus on the information they are sharing, and she concisely reiterates information and tasks to ensure everyone is on the same page. She is not quite as accurate at judging the emotional state of senior lawyers. Sometimes Lawyer #2 asks task-related follow-up questions too quickly. Slowing down the conversation by reiterating general instructions could allow her to glean more global, contextual information about how the senior lawyer feels about the representation and wants to approach it.

Ultimately, whatever the context, effective listening demonstrates strength at each step of the listening process — roughly attention, perception, memory, understanding, analysis, and response. (This outline is drawn very generally from listening frameworks such as Brownell’s HURIER model and Worthington and Fitch-Hauser’s MATERRS model.)

Also regardless of context, effective listeners are “uniform” in their ability to choose and tailor their approach for the particular situation. The best communicators will take the internal/external factor into account — of course. But that’s just one of many other factors such as the length of the relationship; the other person’s stress level; the complexity of the content; the time of day; and the other person’s preferred style of communication such as informal or formal, just to brainstorm a few.

In this sense listening is just like all the other communication tasks a lawyer performs: there is a very broad common framework for effectively performing each task, and the most effective listeners/speakers/writers tailor their approach within the framework to meet the needs of the client — whether internal or external.

*Thanks to Lou Spelios for comments on an earlier version of this post.

Summer reading

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Listen Like a Lawyer now has two candidates for a (hypothetical) Very Challenging Book Club: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, previously discussed here; and Zia Haider Rahman‘s In the Light of What We Know (2014). I chose Rahman’s novel for a reading challenge this summer and have not been disappointed — although I’m not quite finished with it.

The main characters are a former lawyer and a soon-to-be-former investment banker who is looking like the fall guy, perhaps deservedly, for his firm’s involvement with bad derivatives trading. This is a gross oversimplification, but as the New York Times book review stated, the book is so big in length and scope that it defies summary. The rewards, however, are great, such as this passage — and here we finally come to the topic of listening.

It’s page 268. The narrator has just told his father, an Oxford-educated Princeton physicist, about the narrator’s likely fall from grace in investment banking:

When I got to telling him that I thought the firm was about to let me go and would possibly even try to hang me out to dry, my father did not make reassuring sounds, did not contradict me with the groundless optimism of someone reassuring himself as much as another–that was never his way. He simply listened. (Some years ago, he explained to me his belief that that kind of hollow consolation was disrespectful because it presumed that the person being consoled wouldn’t see or care about the absence of reason. The thing to first and foremost, he believed, was not to talk but to listen, and listening, like anything difficult, is easier said than done.) I talked for some time, finding more and more details to tell him. Even things I hadn’t consciously thought much about I brought up, understanding then how much they had actually been weighing on my mind.

The scene goes on to weave in a few more listening lessons, such as the father’s perception of what has not been said — namely anything about the narrator’s wife. “My omission must have been as obvious to him as it now was to me.”

At a turning point in the conversation, the father also moves his chair to sit at a right angle to the narrator: “It was how my mother liked to sit. There was something less confrontational this way, she’d said. This way you see the person’s good side.”

So this scene occurs about halfway through the book. I have more than 200 pages to go, in which some kind of big betrayal is apparently going to be revealed, along with a disenchanting look (already foreshadowed) at NGO activities in Afghanistan.

At times I have been tempted to take a break from this book. It is amazing, but it is also taxing my focus and persistence. And now I can say it was a success because it produced a blog post. Yet something I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education is motivating me to persevere. Erik Shonstrom is a rhetoric professor grappling with the idea that reading ambitious novels teaches critical thinking. His essay is great for any readers of this blog who may be encouraging their children to read by telling the children how good it is for their brains, something like an intellectual green smoothie. Shonstrom says yes, fine, tell yourself that big novels help with critical thinking, but that’s actually not the payoff:

The payoff for me — and what I secretly hope for my students — is something else. Yes, I want them to develop critical faculties for decoding the world, but what I’m really after in teaching the novel is the insight to develop meaning through their experiences. I want them to notice what they notice, both in the word and — more important — within themselves. Reading novels, I believe, acutely calibrates these internal receptors. Readers are able to hear the voice in their head more clearly. . . . When reading a long novel, we start to pay attention to that running line of commentary in our heads because we’re hopelessly bored. For me, the situation is similar to long hikes in the mountains. There’s no structure or “entertainment,” and we’re left with nothing but our own thoughts, which get amplified by the lack of distraction.

So I will finish In the Light of What We Know. There probably won’t be another lesson in listening dynamics, but there is sure to be more on mathematics, physics, cognitive science, South Asian history, and international relations, not to mention some painful romantic breakups. If analysis and contemplation stand in opposition to one another as Shonstrom writes (quoting Sven Birkerts in The American Scholar) then we can ask another question: where does listening stand, closer to analysis or closer to contemplation? For this we could fall back on our legal education: It depends.

“Listening” to the legal job market

Jennifer Romig2 Comments

“Listening” on social media is not really listening (which requires spoken or nonverbal input) — but it’s an essential skill for lawyers and law students nonetheless.

Practicing lawyers can use social media to understand more about their clients and competition, as legal marketing and social media expert Nancy Myrland discusses here. Listening to social media is valuable to legal scholars as well; Professor Randy Picker of the University of Chicago uses Twitter in part as a “listening medium” and “curated news feed” on topics of interest. Along with several practicing lawyers, Picker describes his experiences with social media in this informative panel discussion on “Social Media and Your Law Practice,” sponsored by the ABA Antitrust Division.

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Courtesy Flickr/bspusf

And law students seeking jobs can listen on social media for a variety of reasons:

  • to better understand a practice area
  • to prepare for interviews by learning about potential employers
  • to explore opportunities for contributing to a potential employer’s social-media presence

Listening to the hot topics and background language in a practice area

Listening to social media can build your knowledge base about the field you’re interested in. For anyone — job seeker or not — social media is a fantastic resource for identifying emerging and recurring legal issues. Emory Law School 3L Anna Saraie uses law firm blogs to learn more about the area she hopes to practice in, labor and employment: “I have bookmarked several blogs run by firms that specialize in labor and employment. The information on these blogs came in handy especially during my interviews because it allowed me to engage in interesting conversations about current issues in the field.”

Social media provides a window not just into “hot topics,” but on a subtler level, into the way experts think and talk in a particular field. The kind of vocabulary and conversational patterns you use in a law school classroom are sometimes not the same as the vocabulary and conversational patterns in a lawyer’s day-to-day life. While social media is not a replacement for real conversation (at least we hope not), it can provide helpful background in hot topics, baseline knowledge, and the specialized vocabulary in a field of law.

Preparing for interviews and networking

Social media can also educate about individual firms. A law student interested in a real-estate firm, for example, could learn more about whether the firm generally represents developers or lenders. A student interested in patent law could understand whether the firm’s practice leans toward a scientific or engineering specialty.

Recent Virginia Law graduate Michelle Carmon used social media extensively in her job search, including studying law offices’ blog comments and retweets. Carmon also used LinkedIn to search for personal connections: “When an interviewer has a public LinkedIn profile, it can provide valuable information that you can use to help establish a connection during the interview. It’s helpful to know in advance if you and an interviewer went to the same college or share an interest in a particular practice area.”

Some of this advice may sound obvious, but it also addresses perennial complaints by employers about receiving overly general and uninformed cover letters, or networking requests indicating a lack of preparation.

Listen for what they’re not saying

If you are trying to listen to what a firm is saying on social media but hearing only crickets, you may have an opportunity right there: If you are interested in working for a firm or lawyer who has no social media presence, your own social media skills could be an asset to that employer.

Legal job applicants with a careful, skillful social media presence may distinguish themselves in the job hunt, as Happy Go Legal points out. New lawyers can contribute content as well as broader policies for maintaining an ethical, effective social media presence. “Lawyers unfamiliar with the tools should enlist new associates fresh out of law school to provide practical tutorials—they’ve always swum in this sea, and naturally have a different mindset,” writes Jared Correia in the ABA’s Law Practice magazine.

Carefully craft your own social media presence

Whether you hope to help a lawyer with maintaining social media or simply want a job practicing law, it is important to have an effective social media presence in your own right. This means actually having a “presence.” At this point, we (the legal industry) should be past the era of trying to shut down all signs of social media life. For example with so many lawyers and law firms on LinkedIn, signing up is a “no brainer.” (This quote is from Kevin O’Keefe, one of the web’s biggest proponents of — well, just read his blog title: Real Lawyers Have Blogs.)

Using social media is valuable, but should be just one part of a mix of job-seeking efforts. Effectively listening to social media could lead to opportunities in real life — where a different kind of effective listening can make all the difference.