Mindful interactions with colleagues

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Mindfulness and listening go together in a lot of ways, some obvious and some subtle. A recent HBR Blog post, “See Colleagues as They Are, Not as They Were,” challenged readers to be more mindful in working with colleagues, especially longtime colleagues.

The post defines mindfulness as “noticing what is happening in the present moment, without judgment.” And thus the post raised the question: when we interact with colleagues, are we present and mindful of who they are now? Or are we substituting our own mental shortcuts of who they were and what they’ve done in the past? The post encourages readers to “See your colleague as they are today, not how you remember them from yesterday”:

[A]s an experiment, simply notice your colleague afresh. How do they look today? What is their tone of voice? What are their facial expressions? Are they really saying the same old stuff, or is there something new to be heard that you could notice and appreciate?

Noticing colleagues afresh is a challenge. This is partly general human nature: “By the time we have worked with someone for a few months or years, we have developed expectations for what they will say and do.” It’s always been that way, of course.

The ever-present role of email only exacerbates these expectations. The author, Duncan Coombs, describes his findings that email communications reinforce and solidify expectations about coworkers:

I’ve previously written with my good friend and colleague, Darren Good, about the “flash images” we form about people when we see their names in our inboxes. This flash image, based on past experiences, happens before you even read the content of the email, and then influences the way we read the email. While this is a normal part of brain functioning, it has a potentially adverse impact when our negative lens leads to negative interpretations.

I believe the legal workplace suffers from these issues as much as any other industry, and maybe more so (at least in law firms).

An associate does good work, and she builds the “halo effect” around everything she does—whether the work remains stellar or not. Another associate produces a weak assignment or two, and she her billables just start fading away. The effect cuts the other way too: Associates may develop positive expectations about working with a particular partner, which lead them to enjoy the work and do it well. Conversely some partners may engender a sense of existential dread among associates prodded onto their teams. The same effect influences relationships with paralegals, administrative support staff, and legal professionals throughout the firm. And the e-mail “flash image” reinforces all of the above.

Many would say this is far from a problem; in fact it is (a) reality and (b) a good thing.

In a law firm, an associate builds her reputation—for better or worse. Keith Lee wrote about the difference in personal brand (what you say about yourself) and reputation (what others say about you) . The work inside a law firm flows toward the individual lawyers with strong reputations, and away from others. Individual lawyers’ reputations are important because they contribute to (or detract from) the overall health of the law firm.

This is true in any business of course, but the competitive reality of law practice and the pessimistic mindset of lawyers may exacerbate it. As one lawyer stated to Law360 in giving advice and admonitions to new associates, “what takes years and hard work to build can be lost in a second with one bad decision or lapse of judgment.”

I don’t think the HBR post is arguing against a lawyer’s earned reputation and its deserved effects. Nor am I, here in this post.

I think the post is digging into the process of how a reputation happens in the first place. If a reputation comes about from non-mindful, even lazy mental shortcuts of others based on insufficient, incomplete, or inaccurate information, reputation is not only not a good thing but actually bad or at least far from optimal. Consequences that come to mind include frustrated individual working relationships that result in less accurate information, less effective distributions of work, wastefully “writing off” legal professionals despite achievements and potential, and shrinking or illusory opportunities for professional development.

Is working with someone for “a few months” enough to accurately define that person’s capabilities and, accordingly, their reputation? Even if a working relationship has lasted years, could a person actually change?

These questions open up numerous discussions on assessment and evaluation, as well as a “growth” or “fixed” mindset about human capacity, with implications too big for one post. At the individual level, the HBR post goes on to some positive recommendations for interacting more mindfully with colleagues:

As an experiment, consciously seek to notice something positive about the person. What is one thing about this person that you appreciate? What is one thing they say that is helpful? What is their contribution to the organization? What is their single greatest strength? Focus on that and pay total attention to that one thing. Hold that focus and make that your first “foothold” on the path to an improved relationship.

These are recommendations that some skeptical lawyers may find naive. Supervisors who complete and sign semi-annual evaluations simply don’t need to make this effort. There’s a path of less resistance: directing their work and their time to other associates and legal professionals where the positive reactions come more easily and naturally. (Thus it’s very good advice for new attorneys to treat partners like clients from day one, and try to avoid this situation in the first place.)

But for attorneys and legal professionals who are committed to—or stuck in—working arrangement for some time, this positive advice may be helpful to frame more mindful, constructive interactions.

For more on mindfulness, see the work of Jeena Cho. Her book, The Anxious Lawyer, will be coming out this year. Her course on “Better Lawyering through Mindfulness” touches on mindful listening and many other topics. She writes for Above the Law.

This article originally from the Vermont Bar Journal and now posted on the Ohio Supreme Court’s website also touches on themes of mindfulness in interacting with others.

Resolution: Delight them

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Delight your clients.

That’s a good New Year’s Resolution for lawyers, right?

It’s an entrenched, almost clichéd piece of general business advice. But should lawyers try to delight their clients? It seems like the answer should be “of course!!” But what does that even mean?

A recent reference to delighting the client prompted this post, “3 Vital Mindsets for Creating Impact for the Legal Industry” by Seyfarth Shaw’s Laura Maecthlen on Medium. She reflected back on her hectic law practice in the final month of 2015, when she wasn’t thinking broadly about the legal industry but rather working away with depositions, negotiations, and a lot of detailed, focused, specifically client-centered work.

This day-to-day level of law practice, Maecthlen suggested, is an under-appreciated source of ideas about legal innovation. Those ideas should come not only from large-scale abstract thinking about the legal industry, but also from “the everyday activities of working lawyers . . . in the trenches of our legal system every day.” As she wrote,

It is in this space — personal, one-on-one and face-to-face — that we create real change for ourselves and each other.

And this observation—essentially, “small is the new big”—leads to the question of delight:

With all the talk of innovation in our industry, a person could easily lose track of the real goal of innovation, which is to create positive impact. If you stop to consider what we as practitioners are trying to accomplish, you realize it’s simple: higher-value client solutions aimed to delight our clients. Innovation is only one means to achieve this.

What do others say about delighting clients in the legal industry?

On a positive note, legal marketer Merrilyn Astin Tarlton advised lawyers to surprise and delight their clients in several ways. Drop in on their clients, free of charge, and learn more about their business. (This is common but excellent advice.) Give compliments. Help clients see patterns and prevent those patterns from occurring, such as better training and policies to reduce a pattern of lawsuits. Over-deliver and deliver early, rather than setting suggested deadlines and then meeting them just barely or missing them. Say thank you, often.

But the delight concept often comes wrapped in some more ominous tones.

Non-delighted clients are less likely to be long-term clients, and many lawyers are deluded about their clients’ level of delight. That was a theme developed by lawyer and and knowledge-management consultant V. Mary Abraham interviewed legal leadership consultant Susan Hackett. The post is “Focus on Clients; If You Delight Them They Will Stay.” Hackett’s work shows that 85 percent of outside counsel give themselves an “A” for their work, but only 35 percent of in-house counsel would in fact recommend their outside counsel to other clients.

What can lawyers do to climb into that 35 percent—to get that “A” grade and make the client “fall in love” with their services? One big step has to do with listening, with two necessary sub-parts to make it work. Part one is about asking meaningful questions of clients:

The very best way to deliver value to each client you serve is simply to ask them what it is that they value, what it is that you’re doing right or could do better, what it is that other lawyers or service providers offer them that makes them pleased with the service, and how it is that you personally could improve.  Ask it in person, ask it in surveys, ask it outside the course of matters, ask it during the matters on which you’re serving. Saying once a year over dinner, `so how are we doing?’ is going to get an answer as specific as `just great.’  Trust me, that’s not the feedback you need.

And part two is about listening to and doing something about that feedback:

Asking for feedback is not the same thing as acting on it.  Too many of us ask for feedback and then we sit back and `admire’ (or ignore) the results. Instead, we need to take actions that allow us to improve from the feedback.  If you receive positive feedback, look for ways to apply the principles underlying your success to other kinds of work. At a minimum, when the evaluations relate to performance, include them in the performance reviews of those involved. After all, if lawyers’ compensation and advancement are only tied to the number of hours they’ve billed, and not to how well they serve clients, we’re all in trouble.

Delight also came up in the context of “in-house counsel gripes” which is practically its own genre of posts on Law 360. Rich Baer, then of Qwest Communications and now Liberty Media, urged lawyers to borrow the delight aspiration from non-legal businesses:

When you’re thinking about client service, don’t think like a lawyer, think like the owner of a great restaurant or the manager of a wonderful resort and really strive to delight your client every time you’re dealing with them.”

While this statement itself is positive, the rest of the post (which quoted other in-house counsel as well) essentially bludgeoned the reader with what not to do. Don’t surprise the client, don’t max out bills, and don’t send 50-page memos when short e-mails can give the same information. (The post also quoted Baer criticizing outside counsel who fail to share a “simple thank you for the business”—the mirror-image of Tarlton’s advice to say thank you often.)

Thinking about what not to do brings us back to the business theory of whether delight should be a client service goal at all. If you search “delighting customers,” the top result is a Harvard Business Review piece urging the opposite: “Stop trying to delight your customers.”

The article argued that the vast majority of decisions are made not because someone is delighted and drawn to the amazing service of a business. Rather, these decisions are made because of being annoyed, put off, frustrated, and otherwise subject to terrible service. Customers have the impulse to “punish bad service” much more so than to “reward delightful service.” (This idea is rooted in psychological studies that “Bad Is Stronger than Good” previously discussed on the blog here.)

Therefore, the HBR piece argues, the better approach to customer satisfaction is not delight but “reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved.”

In her post on goals for 2016, Seyfarth Shaw’s Maecthlen was onto this as well. She urged finding clients’ “pain points” and making “process improvements” to address them. (This rhetoric is consistent with the legal project management movement that sometimes speaks in the language of delight.)

Addressing pain and process comes up in so many different ways. Many process improvements are substantive, like the suggestion above about recognizing and mitigating a pattern of small sporadic lawsuits. Of course the method of communication itself may be a pain point as well.

Here, as I write on a Friday afternoon, a small but specific example comes to mind. Some clients may not enjoy receiving a barrage of legal updates late Friday afternoon as lawyers clean and close their own inboxes. The lawyer may feel a sense of respite and reprieve, while the client now has a list of things to do just at the beginning of the weekend. Other clients may appreciate a regular consolidated end-of-the-week update. What is their preference?

Asking what they want and respecting that preference is not all that innovative. But, to paraphrase Laura Maechtlen, it’s this one-on-one and face-to-face work that can—perhaps—add up to a sense of delight.

 

 

 

Best of 2015

Jennifer Romig1 Comment

This post is a rather unscientific summary of some of the best articles and posts related to lawyers, law practice, and listening in 2015. Please feel free to comment on other sources you think should be considered among the best of 2015.

General article of the year

How People with Type A Personalities Can Become Better Listeners

Type A personality patterns include competitiveness, urgency, and hostility. For type A people, “the listening struggle is real.” This article offers a few techniques for compensating such as practicing the “WOA” method: Wait. Observe. Allow. It’s amazing what one can learn by patiently waiting and letting the person finish his or her thought.

Study of the year

Take a paragraph. Have one test group read the paragraph out loud to a listening audience. Have another test group hand over the paragraph in writing so the audience reads the exact same text. These two audiences will rank the speaker as more intelligent than the writer, even though the text is exactly the same. The study, conducted by business-school professors at the University of Chicago, found this result to be true across several different conditions. Even when a text is written to be read rather than spoken, audiences who hear it still rank the speaker more highly than audiences who rank the author after reading it.

It is thought that “vocal cues” provide more signals of intellect than are available in the reading experience. As one study author summed up,  “If you read aloud my written pitch, you’d sound smarter than my written pitch.” The study was described in the New York Times here, “The Mouth Is Mightier than the Pen.” The study is available here, with a subscription to Sage Publications: http://pss.sagepub.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/cgi/content/long/26/6/877 (subscription required)

Law review article of the year

A theme of this blog has been that it’s difficult to measure listening and even more difficult for any person to accurately judge just how good—or bad—a listener they are.* Professor Andrea Curcio of Georgia State wrote about how hard it is to accurately judge one’s own cultural sensibility as well, due to a variety of cognitive biases. A culturally sensible lawyer is a lawyer “who understand[s] that we all have multifaceted cultural backgrounds, experiences, and biases that affect how we perceive and analyze legal problems and how we interact with clients and colleagues.” Curcio’s article discusses cultural sensibility, barriers to developing it, and methods law schools/classes may consider to foster it. Being not just theoretically knowledgeable but actually skilled at cultural sensibility leads to more effective listening, which is why this article is LLL’s law review article of the year. The citation and link are here:  Andrea Curcio, Addressing Barriers to Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lessons from Social Cognition Theory, 15 Nev. L. J. 537 (2015).

Book of the year (reviewed on the blog)

Heidi Grant Halvorson, No One Understands You and What To Do About It, reviewed here. This book is short and insightful for analyzing different aspects of communication situations through the lenses of trust, ego, and power. The book explores ways to make a more accurate, less distorted impression and perhaps even recover from having made a bad impression.

Book of the year (still to be reviewed)

Another book of the year, not yet reviewed on this blog is Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015). The New York Times (and specifically, Jonathan Franzen) reviewed it here. He sums up the book as a “call to arms”:

Our rapturous submission to digital technology has led to an atrophying of human capacities like empathy and self-­reflection, and the time has come to reassert ourselves, behave like adults and put technology in its place.

Tweet of the year

This is from the Clio Cloud Conference in the keynote by John Suh, CEO of Legal Zoom:

 

Word of the year

Manterrupting

Pam Woldow and Doug Richardson wrote a great series on “manterruption” at Pam’s website At the Intersection: Where General Counsel & Law Firms Connect. They wrote about this issue in three parts:

Part 1: Are You a Manterrupter?

Part 2: The Quest for a Cure 

Part 3: Reader Responses and Connecting the Dots

Not surprisingly, some of the feedback they received included helpful thoughts such as “Stick to your knitting.” Some of the other feedback was actually constructive and hopeful.

Runner up for word of the year

Deipnosophist: “a person skilled in table talk”

Hat tip to @LibrarySherpa:

  

Futuristic thought of the year

Ken Grady of Seytlines argues for process improvement and technological innovation in the legal industry, while also maintaining that soft skills have never been more important. In a September post on measuring lawyer performance, he touched on the possibility of wearable sociometric devices that will quantify social skills and effectiveness—essentially, as Ken said, a “FitBit for listening.” Such devices can already measure “proximity to other employees, who was talking, engagement levels, and other data points.” Such data can be interpreted to “determine which group dynamics led to more creativity or productivity.” (Seyfarth CEO Stephen Poor more broadly explored the idea of FitBits for lawyers as well.)

Thus, perhaps by 2016 or 2017 one of the “best of” posts here will include someone’s experience using a sociometric device to assess their actual listening skills.

*(By 2017 “their” as a pronoun for “someone” and “a person” will be widely accepted as well, but that is a different post for a different day on a different blog.)

The 4 T’s of Listening

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One of Listen Like a Lawyer’s most enduringly popular posts is “A Model of Listening.” The honest truth about why it’s so popular appears to be that students enrolled in listening classes are doing searches like these:

models of listening
model of listening
HURIER model
HURIER model of listening

One clue that these are college students is the timing of these searches: they tend to spike toward the end of the fall and spring semesters. I had actually never heard of a college course in listening until starting this blog two years ago. That’s when I found Judi Brownell’s textbook, Listening: Attitudes, Principles, and Skills. One of the blog’s earliest posts was that Model of Listening posts exploring the “HURIER” model and how it fits with lawyering. (HURIER stands for Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating, and Responding.) Apparently a lot of students are assigned to write about this model.

Thinking about college classes in listening leads, inevitably, to thinking about the idea of a law school class in listening. I am not aware of any law-school class focused directly and solely on listening in the way a legal writing class focuses on writing, for example. (Please comment or e-mail if this is not correct.)

Of course listening is directly involved in any class with interviewing, deposing or examining witnesses, or negotiating. It’s a small but crucial part of effective oral advocacy. And part of the overall motivation for Listen Like a Lawyer is that listening plays a subtle role in just about all law school and lawyering activities. A more effective listener is going to be better at taking exams based on in-class material, better at writing papers building off of class discussion, and better at handling skills classes and clinics. Essentially, listening helps in any context where other people are involved. (Professor Tami Lefko presented a menu of ideas for incorporating listening throughout the law-school curriculum at the 2014 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute, with slides available here. Her awesome collection of listening-related YouTube clips is available as a guest post here as well.)

At the conclusion of my legal writing class, I like to talk about the content of the class and next steps for the students using the following framework, the 4 T’s:

  • Tradition
  • Trends
  • Techniques
  • Transfer

The same framework could be useful in shaping a law-school listening course. So here’s an exploration of what the final class session might look like in a law-school listening class.

Tradition

Listening has its traditions (which have been covered and practiced throughout this semester). Perhaps the listening tradition most deeply embedded in law comes from the conflict resolution field. Mediators seem to have the most training and, in the mediators I’ve been lucky to meet, the most personal affinity with the value of listening. In mediation, the chance to be heard is respected if not absolutely paramount. The mediator’s role in “nuanced listening” for the real conflict is crucial.

Advocacy presents the opportunity for high-stakes listening. Lawyers who examine witnesses must be able to listen to a witness, echo the testimony when needed, and recognize what is not being said. (The same is true of listening to opposing counsel.) There is a strong tradition of listening as part of appellate advocacy as well: Listen to the specific question and respond to it. Listen to the overall feel of the bench and adjust your argument accordingly.

Unfortunately what seems to be the most significant actual or perceived listening tradition is the law is this:

Lawyers are terrible listeners.

This recent observation from John Suh of Legal Zoom may capture it all:

It does not seem a stretch to say the legal profession attracts talkers, not listeners. Any traditions of listening within the legal profession must thus reflect a knowledge of the audience. Essentially, many bad listeners will only want to get better if they think it’s in their self interest. That was one lesson of experience suggested by Debra Worthington, a professor at Auburn University and experienced trial consultant as well as co-author of another college listening textbook. In this sense listening can be coached in a somewhat Machiavellian way, like mindfulness coaching for Type A personalities.

Trends

Legal project management is one movement with listening-related implications such as planned and spontaneous face-to-face meetings. When is face time valuable or a waste of time? What about collaborative platforms that allow clients and lawyers to access and monitor each other’s work real time, with no “wall” of email protocol to separate the work from the communication about that work?

“Social listening” on social media channels is not really listening at all, but it speaks to the way business is done and people communicate today. Lawyers interested in social media will encounter advice to engage in social listening essentially for marketing and understanding how they and competitors are perceived. “Listening” on social media is also of course a trend in juror and witness research.

Returning to depositions for a moment, court reporters may give way to voice recordings and digital transcriptions, a controversial topic to say the least. (How would a listening course be graded? A lot of ideas come to mind and frankly many of them involve some aspect of writing about listening. For example, a good essay question in a listening course would be to discuss the movement toward “digital court reporters” and what that would mean for the judicial process.)

Artificial intelligence-enabled devices that can detect facial expressions—and perhaps predict lying—will be an interesting development to watch as well. Wearable “sociometric devices” may be able to measure and report a person’s ratio of talking to listening.

Techniques

Techniques of listening would of course include “active listening” as well as “passive listening,” as outlined in Professor Neil Hamilton’s law-review article Effectiveness Requires Listening.

There is also the technique of fact investigation that involves first listening with open-ended questions throughout the witness’s first narrative, and then reviewing each step with closed questions to firm up the information.

The art of asking good questions is so critical for lawyers not just in litigation but in any activity including—importantly for those who need to earn a living in private practice—marketing.

And listening for what isn’t being said is one of the most challenging and valuable skills a listener can work on. (Peter Drucker is the most often quoted on this point:  “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”)

Those are just a few examples of the “listening toolkit” lawyers can develop.

Transfer

As with any skill, the ideal is to be able use that skill in a variety of settings beyond the specifics of how it was taught and learned. This is the core of what “learning transfer” mean—transferring learning to new contexts.

Listening skills could be transferred in a myriad of ways. Strong recall of spoken language is always a benefit, but has to be adjusted for the social context. For example, a lawyer may show a high level of skill at remembering and echoing key parts of a witness’s answer and moving forward in an unforgettably effective direct or cross before a jury. However, this echoing might seem aggressive and/or robotic in a private and casual conversation with a prospective client. A subtle and selective echoing could work quite well. Or, weeks later, a thoughtful handwritten follow-up note that paraphrases the conversation can make a very positive impression.

One of the most difficult questions about lawyers and listening is the role of trust. Lawyers simply cannot deeply and trustingly—and naively—listen with an open heart in a combative deposition or negotiation. Different listening skills are required in collaborative and competitive contexts. Even with clients, too much trust may lead to trouble:

But if lawyers transfer distrustful listening to all contexts, that’s really not good either. Several great posts have been written on bad things that happen when lawyers bring certain communication techniques home with them, as in “6 Things We Learned in Law School that Shouldn’t Be Tried at Home.”

And even within work-related contexts, there is certainly room for lawyers to compassionately listen to one another. Perhaps a stronger listening culture with in the community could in some way help ameliorate some of the stress and alienation, not to mention substance abuse and depression, that afflicts the legal profession. Practices such as bar-sponsored “take opposing counsel to lunch” events are a start.

Learning is a process

The ultimate message of this “traditions-trends-techniques-transfer” framework is that learning doesn’t end—or at least it shouldn’t end, and for the truly effective lawyers and lawyer students it never ends—when any given class is over.

Where does this leave the lawyer who wants to be a better listener? For one thing, the lawyer can seek training and the opportunity to reflect on his or her current skills as a listener. Here are a few CLEs related to listening that were offered this past year: “Civility Skills CLE: The Art of Listening” and “The Ethics of Listening—and Not Listening—to Your Client”. I am fascinated with the idea of actors teaching “improvisation CLE” and hope to take one of these classes sometime. On a more traditional note, in a few weeks I will have the privilege of taking an intensive mediation class and fully expect it to address listening in depth.*

Beyond CLEs, lawyers can read about listening, not only on blogs (ahem) but also books such as Thanks for the Feedback (which is about taking feedback effectively and has a lot to say about listening more generally) or Power Listening (which is more in the strategic, utilitarian school of listening). A thoughtful and challenging legal blog that often touches on listening is Lee Rosen’s Divorce Discourse. (For example here’s a post on how not listening is one of the worst mistake a lawyer can make in an initial consultation.) Kenneth Grady’s Seytlines blog and other writing touches at times about listening to corporate clients in the context of larger themes about legal-services delivery and innovation. (Here’s his “5 Reasons to Become a Doctor Dolittle of Client Communication.”)

That’s at least 75 minutes worth of material to talk about. So that’s  the end of these hypothetical lecture notes for the hypothetical final class in a hypothetical law-school listening course. Good luck and please stay in touch.

*Side note for 2016: I’ve also recently had the pleasure of meeting and talking with several listening experts who are working on a potential listening CLE at the International Listening Association’s meeting in Tucson in March 2016. I may have the opportunity to be a guest speaker or contributor in some way, and will let blog readers know more about that as it develops.

The Good Lawyer

Jennifer Romig2 Comments

levitlinder

“What does it mean to be a good lawyer?” Thus begins The Good Lawyer: Seeking Quality in the Practice of Law by Douglas O. Linder & Nancy Levit (Oxford 2014). The introduction assures readers there will not be chapters such as “The Good Lawyer Uses Proper Citation Format.” (Why not? asks the legal writing professor.)

Instead, The Good Lawyer explores empathy, courage, willpower, valuing others in the legal community, intuition as well as deliberation, realistic thinking, the pursuit of justice, integrity, and persuasion. Its final chapter addresses the difficulty of all of these in the current legal climate. 

The book is largely aspirational but delves into skills and techniques. Its first chapter—”The Good Lawyer Is Empathetic”—would be valuable to any lawyer who wants to be a better listener.

Empathy has been defined as “our ability to identify what somebody else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts or feelings with an appropriate emotion.”

And what are the actual benefits of a lawyer’s being empathetic?

First, empathy enables you to acknowledge and respect other people’s thoughts, so they feel valued. Second, empathy substantially reduces the likelihood of miscommunications that can lead to wasted effort and counterproductive results. Third, as you become more aware of other people’s feelings, you more readily assess their feelings toward you and can make adjustments to smooth things over when necessary.* . . . Fourth, having walked inside another’s skin, you’ll be better able to compellingly tell that person’s story, should the time and place arise for it.

*The omitted portion of the quote says this: “When others think you’re being a jerk, at least you know it soon enough to stop your jerk-like behavior and apologize.”

I am well aware of the sentiment that being a jerk is necessary or even desirable at times, as a way of serving a client’s interests. It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that’s not the agenda of Linder and Levit. In their chapter on serving the true interests of clients, they walk through various roles a lawyer may serve: helping the client win; being a “mere tool” of the client’s autonomy; or essentially telling the client what to do based on the lawyer’s legal expertise.

Their recommended approach is none of these in isolation. Instead they embrace more of a collaborative deliberation: “The most demanding and also the most rewarding function that lawyers perform is to help their clients decide what it is that they really want, to help them make up their minds as to what their ends should be” (quoting Anthony Kronman). Linder and Levit acknowledge that “many forces today conspire to limit opportunities for lawyers and clients to enter into deep moral conversations, as friends might do.”

They go on to discuss specific communication techniques to help lawyers learn more about their clients’ interests in meaningful conversations. For example lawyers can frame conversations in terms of “we” (i.e. the lawyer and client together). Lawyers can ask clients who else would be affected by various approaches, and how those others might respond. 

These suggested techniques are valuable, yet perhaps meager given what it takes to forge a truly collaborative relationship and be someone’s friend in a moral sense. On this point and others, the book was (lightly) critiqued by David Lat in the Wall Street Journal as being better at issue-spotting than at deeply diving into practical solutions. 

The issues to be spotted include a number of tough questions. For example, are empathetic lawyers born, or can they be made? Linder and Levit review psychological literature showing that empathy can be taught in the sense that people can get better at recognizing emotions. The evidence is weaker for the teachability of the empathetic response. A checklist on “How to Make the Most of Your Empathy” (page 17) would be a good primer for new lawyers, or for more experienced lawyers who want to work on making a better connection with clients. The book also cites the scholarship of Kristin Gerdy and Ian Gallacher on incorporating empathy into legal education and teaching students how to “think like a non-lawyer.”

Another tough issue both individually and socially is whether empathy can  actually be harmful. Highly empathetic people may burn out and run from extremely painful situations, or may cross ethical boundaries to help those with whom they empathize. (In raising the topic of whether judges should be empathetic, the book cites Justice Blackmun’s “Poor Joshua!” dissent, recently in the news again after the death of Joshua DeShaney at age 36.)

The chapter on persuasion features the book’s most specific treatment of listening and lawyering:

Listening and interpreting body language, two skills that allow us to understand—and then better influence—the thinking and emotion of others, receive nothing like the attention each deserves. Only by listening to a client can a lawyer understand what the client wants and develop a theme for a story that might help the client her goal, and listening carefully to a judge’s questions or remarks is essential to the process of addressing any concerns the judge might have with your argument. People, of course, send signals with their bodies, not just with their words, and being attentive to the body language of clients, witnesses, jurors, and judges also can be critical to a lawyer’s success. Sometimes lawyers are so focused on covering each of twenty points on the outline of an argument that they don’t see the judge or juror stifling a yawn, raising eyebrows, or crossing arms; these are all signs that the lawyers are going seriously off track and need to change course. Defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, describing the work of another lawyer he admired, said that he kept his eyes “ever on his audience.” Bailey continued, “The slightest quizzical brow, a mere change of impression of a single juror, these would be a sign from which he could shift and bear down on a point, paraphrase it if he thought the first shot hadn’t got through, or shift his topic if he thought attention was starting to drift.”

There is no chapter titled “The Good Lawyer Listens.” Yet The Good Lawyer advocates that the good lawyer does listen. Listening helps lawyers understand clients and make them feel valued. If that’s not enough, listening also helps lawyers figure out what to say.

Listening from ignorance to mastery

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The Farnam Street blog has this, this morning on becoming a lifelong learner:

When assessing our competence in any particular discipline, we can place our level of ability somewhere along a continuum moving from ignorance, to conversational competence, to operational competence, then towards proficiency, and finally all the way to mastery.

The quote is from Laurence Enderson, Pebbles of Perception: How a Few Good Choices Make All the Difference, a collection of wisdom inspired by Charlie Munger, lawyer and vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway. I haven’t read the book, but Farnam Street extensively quotes its exhortations to move beyond “coasting,” and rather to embrace lifelong learning. The passage on this continuum of learning was of particular interest.

What would this continuum look like as applied to listening?

Ignorance

It seems like many are operating in a state of ignorance about listening as a concept and an improvable skill. Yet they may be decent or even very strong listeners. In the same way, a talented self-taught writer may not use the vocabulary learned at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but still produce great prose. On the other hand, many others are ignorant of listening and/or ignorant about how bad they are at listening. (This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, a delusion of competence that applies to listening as to any other skill and has been discussed on the blog here and here and here.)

Conversational Competence

For the rest of us—the coachable who haven’t yet been coached—a state of ignorance about listening seems inexcusable, although common. I say it’s inexcusable in part because “conversational competence” can be reached without a lot of effort. A bit of time spent learning active listening could be sufficient.

Operational Competence

The operational competence is harder. Actually practicing active listening is much more of a challenge than talking about it. And what if active listening isn’t even the right strategy?

Professor Neil Hamilton, in a formative law review article on listening, talked about passive listening as well. (Here’s the link: “Effective Requires Listening: How to Assess and Improve Listening Skills.”) Passive listening has three components, according to Hamilton (citations omitted):

First, the attorney should place an emphasis on silence in conversations. “[A] brief but definite pause in a conversation” can be an effective tool, allowing the client to collect his or her thoughts and then provide information in a more comfortable fashion.The failure to allow periodic silence can interrupt a client‟s stream of association and make the client feel cut off, hurried, or pressured. Effective lawyers will often pause and allow the client to reflect before continuing with their dialogue.

The second key to passive listening is the use of “minimal prompts.” While silence can make some clients and lawyers uncomfortable, “minimal prompts” can let the client know that the lawyer is listening and understands what is being said.

The final passive-listening technique is the use of open-ended questions.

Of these three techniques, the first—using silence—seems by far the hardest. The role of silence is a challenge for many, perhaps especially for lawyers. Legal Zoom CEO John Suh recently offered the following statistic:

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Before one becomes operationally competent in tolerating and even encouraging real silence, one must first be operationally competent in remaining silent while someone—such as a client—is talking.

Proficiency and Mastery

What makes a listener not only competent, but even proficient and, eventually, masterful? Malcolm Gladwell profiled “gifted listener” Konrad Kellen, the Vietnam consultant who was able to listen to interviews with the North Vietnamese without bias. This meant he did not allow the prevailing theory of the war to shape his perception of what they meant.

Listening without bias is closely connected to hearing what isn’t being said:

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

-Peter Drucker

In other words, great listeners overcome the “availability bias” of paying attention to what is on the list or what the witness is saying, instead of what is not.

So proficient listening is in part a set of technical skills such as appropriate body language, recall, notetaking, compensating for cognitive biases such as the availability bias. Professor Neil Hamilton’s article provides a variety of self-assessments and exercises. Taken together, the questions on the self-assessment provide a sort of schematic of a masterful listener. Here’s an excerpt:

  • I use head nods and facial expressions to indicate that I am listening to a speaker.
  • I establish and maintain eye contact with a speaker.
  • I maintain strong posture and avoid slouching during conversations.
  • I notice changes in a speaker’s volume or tone of voice or nonverbal expressions.

But masterful listening can be—and at least sometimes should be—more than a set of techniques. Hamilton ultimately approaches listening as a virtue. He writes that “listening requires the ability to empathize and relate authentically to a speaker, in addition to technical skills.”

One difficulty lawyers face with the “virtuous listener” theory is what to do with those who act and speak in bad faith. Even with their own clients, lawyers may need to “trust, but verify.” 

If the true sign of genius is being able to hold two opposing truths in mind at the same time and still function (paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald), then the lawyer-as-listener who reaches mastery is indeed a sort of genius. The lawyer uses all the technical tools of listening. More broadly, the lawyer achieves the virtues of empathy and connectedness—but only when appropriate. Sometimes, as communication consultant Jennie Grau pointed out in her recent interview here, the lawyer-as-listener just has to “listen to respond” (not to understand). The mastery lies in knowing the difference.

I was going to end on that note, but that’s not quite enough. Sometimes a situation that begins with hostility and distrust can be transformed into a real opportunity to resolve a dispute, such as in mediation. Listening has a key role to play here. It’s certainly not easy, and listening may seem at times like a zero-sum game with many players. For example, what if the client (who may not be an advanced listener) perceives the lawyer has somehow empathized too much with the mediator or “the enemy”? The difficulty of these situations is exactly why there’s a difference between the lawyer with competence and the one with mastery. When the conditions are right, the masterful listener can use the tools and virtues of listening not just to encounter and understand a situation, but to change it.

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. 

Listening for international law students: Q&A with Prof. Gabrielle Goodwin

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 Gabe Goodwin, IU Maurer School of Law 8.28.2012Professor Gabrielle Goodwin teaches graduate legal studies at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics, and she taught English as a foreign language before attending law school. In her work at Maurer, she teaches three courses in the graduate legal studies department: legal writing, introduction to U.S. law, and criminal procedure through writing for LLMs. Her research interests include art and cultural heritage law, and she has also contributed to the development of a trilingual university in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Professor Goodwin blogs at http://llmlegalwriting.blogspot.com/. What she likes most about teaching is learning more about people, cultures, and legal systems.

Listen Like a Lawyer is grateful to Professor Goodwin for sharing her thoughts and advice for prospective and current international law students.

For a student considering enrolling in a U.S. law school, how can that student prepare for the style of a U.S. law school class?

A great way to prepare is to take an “Introduction to U.S. Law” type of class in the summer before starting at a U.S. law school. These classes introduce students to the basics of U.S. law and to the style of teaching in U.S. law schools. These days, a lot of law schools are offering such classes to their incoming students and some of them are open to any interested student.

However, not every student is able to attend such a class, and for those students, I would recommend listening to a variety of English language law-related material, such as TED talks, Oyez oral arguments, or legal podcasts, such as Life of the Law, Serial,  and Amicus. Although listening to such programs won’t help students understand the U.S. law school classroom, it will familiarize students with English speaking styles and legal vocabulary and concepts.

Gaining some background knowledge on American history and culture, the political system, ethics and theories of justice, and the structure of the courts would also benefit students as they prepare for law school classes. There are many free audio/video resources online, for example: Overview of the Federal Court System, Supreme Court Interviews, American Law: History and Origins, and The Preamble. Additional resources may be purchased, for example, The Great Courses on American History. 

What are the listening challenges that a student may face in law school, particularly if the professor is speaking a language other than the student’s first language?

 Aside from just understanding what the professor is saying generally, I think the biggest challenge is trying to discern what the point of a lecture is and understanding relevant versus irrelevant information. Also, because of cultural and speech pattern differences, it may be difficult for a non-native speaker of English to figure out when to interject a comment or ask a question. Even knowing the difference between when a professor asks a rhetorical question that doesn’t need a specific answer versus when a professor is waiting for an answer before moving on can be a challenge.

We might think of listening as being a passive activity; however, listening to a lecture, and learning from the lecture, means being an active listener. There are many interesting research studies showing that teaching people how to listen makes a difference in their comprehension. For non-native speakers of English, the challenge in listening is to prioritize what gets more or less attention, monitor understanding, and engage in ongoing self-evaluation and reflection. Students need to pay attention to what’s going on in their own heads while they’re listening – Are they simultaneously translating? Losing concentration? Finding the vocabulary hard to understand? Getting frustrated? – so that they can find ways to mitigate these difficulties.

Listening is not exactly the same as note-taking, but they are certainly related. What type of note-taking techniques do you recommend?

 Note-taking can be difficult for some of the reasons stated above, specifically knowing how to prioritize and organize information, but there are ways to mitigate this challenge. To begin with, students should come prepared to class. That means doing the reading or other homework that provides the background knowledge necessary to listen to and understand what the professor is saying. Predicting the types of information and possible vocabulary words can make students feel more prepared. If appropriate, make a pre-outline of the topics to be covered in class and add notes to the outline during the lecture.

Also, try to listen, understand, prioritize, and organize before writing anything down. Just writing everything the professor says doesn’t help when studying later because the context and relationships between ideas may be missing and because what’s quickly written down and what the professor actually said may in fact be different, leading to wrong conclusions. Similarly, noting words or concepts that are confusing, and then going back to them later to figure out, is better than becoming frustrated and losing the narrative of the lecture.

For some students, creating a “map” of lectures makes sense. Rather than trying to record everything in a linear outline, a student can draw a map of concepts, terms, and other information, which shows the relationships among them and where they fit in the big picture.

Soon after each lecture, class notes should be reviewed and amended. Putting notes in to a standardized outline format helps review and organize the material. Discussing and verifying notes with classmates is another good way to check understanding and review notes for accuracy.

Many international law students have legal expertise or training from their home countries. How can that expertise and training influence students’ experience in U.S. law schools?

 Most international law students come to U.S. law schools better prepared than American students. LL.M. students typically are lawyers in their home countries and have legal training and experience with taking a bar exam, not to mention practice experience. This is a huge advantage because international students are familiar with “the law” and the legal world. They are able to analogize from their prior experiences and training to more quickly understand new concepts.

However, this previous experience and training can be a disadvantage at times. Most international law students come from civil law countries, not common law countries. Noting the similarities and differences between the legal systems can distract students from understanding what is important about those similarities and differences. Also, always comparing what one is learning with what one already knows may get in the way of actually listening to what is being said.

In linguistics, we use the term “false friends” to denote words from different languages that look or sound similar but in fact have very different meanings. For example, parade in English and parada in Spanish, which means “bus stop,” not parade. In U.S. law schools, if international law students rely on “false friends,” concepts or terms that seem similar to those in their own legal systems, they may end up more confused than if they had no preconceived understanding of these concepts or terms.

Your class is a legal writing class. How does students’ listening matter to their legal writing?

We think of language proficiency as involving four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—but these are not discrete skills. If a student is able to discuss and explain an issue, chances are good that the student will also be able to write about it. In my legal writing classes, my students are often asked first to brainstorm, discuss, explain, or clarify an issue as part of the pre-writing process. Talking to me, to each other, or even to themselves can help students decide what’s relevant, clarify their language, and organize their writing.  

What are the most helpful habits that law students can develop to listen effectively in class?

I think the most helpful habits are to think of listening as a multi-stage event:

  1. pre-listening tasks, such as planning and predicting
  2. listening tasks in the moment, such as selective attention, monitoring, evaluating, and organizing
  3. post-listening tasks, such as reviewing and reflecting

Each class lecture is not an isolated event, so trying to understand and fit each lecture into the big picture is also a useful strategy. Finally, it takes real concentration to listen to a lecture for the entire class period, and staying away from distractions, such as browsing the internet, texting, talking with classmates, or thinking about something outside of class, can make that easier.

Being an international student in a U.S. law school is a real challenge, but that challenge is not insurmountable. Developing good listening skills and habits will make the life of an international law student much more comfortable and less intimidating.

Speaking “business”

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Listen Like a Lawyer is a fan of several lawyers who write and blog in ways that touch on listening skills, including but not limited to* Jeena Cho, Keith Lee, Lee Rosen, and Pam Woldow. Another highly, highly recommended blog resource on listening and lawyering is this six-part series from Mark Perlmutter on Trebuchet Legal.

And then there is Kenneth Grady, who writes at Seytlines (for Seyfarth Shaw) and often on Medium. His Medium post today, 5 Reasons to Become a Doctor Dolittle of Lawyer-Client Communications, should be read by any lawyer who interacts with business clients in any way.

Let me repeat that: if you are a lawyer and you ever deal with any client that runs a business, works for a business, or has a background or connection remotely related to business, read this post.

Years ago when I was a summer associate in my first week at a firm, my partner mentor shared the same advice he gave to all new and aspiring attorneys at the time: take more business classes. Now almost 20 years later, Ken’s post updates and magnifies this sentiment, pointing out that the gulf between attorneys and business clients has widened into an even broader gap. And it’s not something one class (or CLE, or blog post) can fix. It’s a cultural chasm, and those who bridge it will succeed.

One thing I really like about Ken’s post is how it presents real-world situations for lawyers to understand the more abstract yet crucial lessons of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. (This book popularized the finding that Israeli parole judges made different decisions depending on whether they were about to eat lunch, or had just eaten lunch.) Are lawyers guilty of retreating to their legal comfort zone? Do lawyers give easy answers to the wrong questions? Trying to understand a client’s real business issue, explore options, and perhaps create new options is certainly more difficult than quickly selecting and suggesting a commonplace legal approach.

(Thoughts on Thinking, Fast and Slow in the context of listening can be found on this blog here and here and here. Keith Lee also shared advice on getting to know your business client in his book for new attorneys, The Marble and Sculptor, reviewed on the blog here.)

Ken’s post touches on listening in a number of ways both abstract and specific. It exhorts lawyers to learn to “speak business” so they can truly understand their clients and help solve their problems. Of course that does not mean adopting the business buzz words that generate so much mocking. (For a more serious and historical insight into business jargon, see this article from The Atlantic.) Speaking business means tearing down—and not incrementally rebuilding—the “artificial ‘law versus business’ wall.”

One of the post’s anecdotes sums up the techniques and benefits of listening in a way that applies to all client conversations, whether corporate or individual. Its message of listening and problem-solving is a fitting close to this post:

One manager approached me with a request that our company immediately bring a lawsuit against a business partner for breaching a contract. Rather than discussing the lawsuit, we talked about the contract and the relationship. After a long conversation, the client opened up and explained that he had misread the contract years ago and had been overpaying the other party to the contract. The business person on the other side came into the relationship after the contract had been signed and just accepted the payments without checking the contract. After investigating a bit further, I called the general counsel of the other party and we were able to work out a solution fairly quickly.

  • This short list was not meant to be exhaustive; please share suggestions on other bloggers who consistently touch on communication issues for lawyers.

How important is listening to new lawyers?

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What do new lawyers actually do?

In a 2013 report, the National Counsel of Bar Examiners studied this question in detail by undertaking a very large survey of practicing lawyers (attempting to reach 20,000 lawyers although ultimately receiving usable survey data from 1,600). They result of this survey was the “Job Analysis Survey,” The key points of which can be found in this summary. (The survey methodology is described in the full report here.) The purpose of this survey was to provide “a job-related and valid basis for the development of licensing examinations offered by NCBE.”

Hat tip to Professor Ben Bratman of Pittsburgh for discussing this report in his recent post on bar-exam and legal-ed reform. Analyzing the results of the survey, Professor Bratman organized the numerous skills included in the survey into five groups: communication, analysis, research, project management, and professionalism. He suggested that this framework may be useful for developing learning outcomes in law school, particularly in response to new ABA guidelines.

The list of most highly rated skills and abilities was of particular interest here as well. Here’s the top ten:

Screen Shot 2015-10-12 at 1.06.53 PM

As you can see, listening was the third most highly rated skill, with respondents ranking it a 3.60 on a scale of 1-4 in terms of significance and 99 percent of newly licensed lawyers needing to perform this skill. (Apparently one percent of lawyers need to write but don’t need to listen, since the only skill that garnered 100 percent was written communication.)

In addition to the very broad category of “listening,” other related skills of interest included #2 (paying attention to details) and #10 (knowing when to go back and ask questions). Listening seems correlated with #5 (professionalism) as well. “Interpersonal skills” almost made the top ten, coming in at #13 with a 3.44 significance rating and 99 percent of newly licensed lawyers needing interpersonal skills.

Chart reprinted by permission of the National Council of Bar Examiners