Not thinking like a lawyer

July 28, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

I went to meet the listening professors (Debra Worthington and Margaret Fitch-Hauser) expecting deep theory. And they did give some, using words like “psychometric” and reflecting on the history of the listening field.

Debra Worthington, Jennifer Romig, and Margaret Fitch-Hauser

But their practical work in trial consulting was where our experiences and vocabularies overlapped a lot more, and where our most interesting conversations took place. Professor Worthington worked for 15 years in courtroom communications before she delved more deeply into listening theory and research. Professor Fitch-Hauser, now celebrating her retirement from Auburn, also works as a consultant and is the person who drew Worthington into the listening field. Their work together culminated in the listening textbook Listening: Processes, Functions and Competency.

The combination of their theoretical strength with their practical experience in the legal field made me doubly grateful for the opportunity to meet and talk with them over a long lunch in Auburn.

Worthington recounted her work with a difficult witness whose arrogance had damaged his case, both on the substance and his refusal to heed his lawyers’ guidance on demeanor. Worthington studied his testimony to understand his view of the case. She talked with him to find out what “really made him tick.” And then she used his underlying motivation to explain the case to him in a different way, and to motivate him to adopt good witness practices not because his lawyers told him too but for his own reasons as well.

As I thought about this anecdote, I became even more intrigued with the role trial consultants may play as listeners. For example, intuition may affect one’s listening. A lawyer’s intuition on dealing with a horrible witness may overlap — but not completely — with a trial consultant’s own intuition. And thus the lawyer and trial consultant would bring complementary methods to the table not just in generating themes and telling the story, but in listening to the people who in turn will be listened to by the jury.

Along these lines, Worthington shared that at an early juncture in her career, after she had already been working in legal communications, she considered whether to continue with graduate education or go to law school. Her mentor advised the former. “Debra,” he said, “your greatest strength is that you don’t think like a lawyer.”

Fitch-Hauser echoed the value of stepping outside the lawyer’s perspective: “It is crucial for attorneys not to expect the client to think as they think, and to make adjustments, and to not expect the jury to think as they think. They need to adjust their strategy and the way they tell their story to meet the jury’s needs.”

Both Worthington and Fitch-Hauser have been interested in questions about how listening intersects with personality, and how listening can be measured. One question I wanted to ask both of them relates to measurement and self-assessment: “How can an attorney know if he or she is a bad listener?”

Fitch-Hauser jumped to take this question:

There are some things anyone — attorney, or any other profession — can do, if they are willing to be objective. Ask yourself: When someone asks a question, do you always know the answer before the answer is given? If your own answer is yes, you may be listening to yourself rather than the other person. This is “selective listening,” which by one definition means “listening for the information that reinforces your own attitudes, ideas, and feelings.”

Worthington added the terms “assimiliation” and “constrasting” to the discussion at this point. Assimilation means taking in information that fits your pre-existing beliefs. Essentially, if you believe someone is similar to you, then you may perceive information from that person as closer to your existing beliefs than it really is. And the opposite is contrasting. If you go into a situation thinking someone has different beliefs, you may tend to perceive that person’s information as more different from your own beliefs than it really is. (Assimilation and contrasting seem generally related to the cognitive phenomenon of confirmation bias. Some general thoughts on listening and various cognitive biases including confirmation bias have been explored on Listen Like a Lawyer here and here and here.)

Fitch-Hauser embodies thoughtful listening in her own conversational style, and reinforced that with some advice: “Don’t be afraid to use silence.” Sometimes clients come to lawyers with a “story” that may or may not match the facts. By talking with them and learning how they feel about the case, and at times remaining silent, an attorney can find out more about the real story behind what the client presents as the “official story.”

Worthington and Fitch-Hauser also touched on the power of nonverbal communication as an aspect of listening. “Look at the client as the client is talking,” Fitch-Hauser advised. “You can hear the pause and see them glance away. And then you can say, ‘It seems like there’s something else you want to add.'”

Ultimately, being a bad listener is somewhat part of the human condition, Worthington said. We all have moments of effective and ineffective listening. Lawyers, and anyone else who cares about communication, can seek an honest self-assessment of when they listen well and not so well. By keeping a communications journal, lawyers can start to recognize the situations when their listening is strong and weak. Reinforcing a theme from their textbook, Worthington noted that the answer to good listening versus bad often lies in the motivation to listen. “Motivation is finding some reason inside ourselves to expend the energy and get in there and listen.”

Fitch-Hauser sharpened the edge a bit: “Pretending to listen isn’t listening. Many people go through the motions. They put on the face, they lean forward, they nod, and they turn on a light. But they truly need to be home.”

Listening to the listening professors

July 22, 2014 Jennifer Romig7 Comments

This week I am excited for the opportunity to meet with two big names in the listening field, Debra L. Worthington and Margaret Fitch-Hauser. They are communication professors at Auburn University and, among many other papers, are co-authors of a 2012 textbook, Listening: Processes, Functions, and Competency.

Professor Worthington has studied persuasion and juror decision-making and, more broadly, the effects of different listening styles. One of her papers addresses whether verbal aggression corresponds with any particular listening style. Not surprisingly. verbal aggression is inversely correlated with a people-focused listening style. But it’s not strongly correlated with the other classic listening styles:

action listening (tendency to focus on errors and inconsistencies in a message, and how it relates to a task)
content listening (tendency to focus on claims and support)
time listening (tendency to focus on how much time a communication event takes, and to prefer hurried interactions)

(These listening styles were first identified by listening scholars Kittie Watson, Larry Barker, and James Weaver and have been explored in a variety of papers. How lawyers may use these different listening styles is an interesting topic for future blog posts.)

Professor Fitch-Hauser studies listening fidelity and other measures of listening. Listening fidelity is a useful concept for any professional: when a listener listens to a speaker/source, how similar are their perceptions of the “communication event” they both experienced? Listening fidelity means their perceptions are more congruent. Her work also has touched on listening styles and personality, such as her paper with Stephanie Lee Sargent and James B. Weaver III on “A Listening Styles Profile of the Type A Personality.”

In their textbook, Worthington and Fitch-Hauser survey the listening literature and acknowledge the difficulties of studying listening. It is so difficult to study because it is inherently a “hypothetical construct, something you know exists but you can’t physically see.” Models of listening provide insight into what is really happening in this hypothetical construct. Thus listening models help with identifying where listening success and failure may occur.

The Worthington Fitch-Hauser model of listening is “MATERRS”:

Mental stimulus – intentionally attending to a noise or stimulus
Awareness – beginning the mental sorting process, which can be adversely impacted by a high cognitive load such as multitasking
Translation – processing the message rationally, emotionally, or both
Evaluation – using existing frameworks for understanding to connect the message to one’s existing knowledge
Recall – storing the message in working memory and possibly long-term memory as well
Response – deciding how to respond
Staying connected & motivated – building relationships, evaluating and perhaps changing one’s own frameworks for understanding future listening events, maintaining motivation to listen, and challenging one’s own personal biases

The last aspect of the WFH listening model — staying connected and motivated — was particularly interesting to me. It represents listening as not just a one-time event but an overall life competency. That’s just one of many reasons I am excited to meet and learn from Professors Worthington and Fitch-Hauser.

Listening, legal writing, and legal reading: there’s an app for that

July 10, 2014August 13, 2015 Jennifer Romig2 Comments

One theme of this blog tilts toward the Luddite: let’s put down our phones, look into one another’s eyes, and really listen, and listen some more. But another theme is to stop worrying and learn to love the technology/internet/digital life etc. Want to be a great listener and a great lawyer? There’s an app for that.

Along those lines, there really is an app that can help listening play a valuable role in the writing and revision process (legal writing or any other kind of writing). Voice Dream Reader is an iPhone/iPad text-to-speech app ($9.99).

Voice Dream Reader can read word-processing documents, PDFs, webpages, certain kinds of digital books, and other types of documents. It integrates seamlessly with many other apps (I used it with Dropbox). Here’s a simple screen shot of some clipped text; visit the App Store to see more examples of what it can do: The default voice that comes with Voice Dream Reader is a little bit computer-ish. Buying a premium voice for $5 or $10 may make this work better for you. I tested out some voices and found that “Salli” was the most listenable for me personally.

Interacting with the app suggested several possibilities for using text-to-speech in legal writing, mainly engaging with your own written work for revising, editing, and proofreading. Text-to-speech could also be valuable for listening to particularly important texts (such as critical research sources). I used Voice Dream Reader to listen to various passages of legal writing and an article about listening and reading. Here are some thoughts on how this app (or other text-to-speech apps) could help with editing and with reading.

Listen to your own writing for flow and proofreading

Most obviously, you could use something like Voice Dream Reader to listen to your own writing. Open a document in Voice Dream Reader and listen to it. They say (and by “they say,” I mean everybody says) editing is about “getting distance from your work.” Listening to your own writing as read by a robot voice is one way to get some distance.

One feature of Voice Dream Reader that fascinated me was its ability to highlight each line and each word as it reads. Speech is slower than thought, and that’s one reason listening is such a challenge. By highlighting the line in yellow and the word inside a red box as it reads, Voice Dream Reader’s multiple inputs help to close that “thought-speech differential” and focus attention on the text. If the sentences are hard to listen to because they are convoluted, too long, or constructed in a confusing way, they probably aren’t readable either. Readability and listenability are closely related, although formulas that quantify readability and listenability may not be identical.* Whether listenability is precisely the same thing as readability need not be resolved by a writer with a pragmatic interest in editing.

To focus on the flow of ideas and connections of sentences, you could turn off the highlighting feature so you don’t see each word highlighted. Listen to the draft in a sort of auditory, storytelling mode. Stop the process when you feel a gap in the story; work on the problem, re-load the new text into Voice Dream (which doesn’t take long) and then resume the listening.

For proofreading, it might be desirable to use the app’s most robotic, computer-sounding voice. The goal is to use technology to get that distance from the draft; a robotic voice can help override the brilliant, friendly internal voice you may hear when editing your own work. (This is the voice that conveniently “fixes” errors as you go, thus compromising the editing process.) Reduce the rate of speech so . . . that . . . the . . . words . . . unroll . . . slowly. Turn on the line and word highlighting so that each word gets its own spotlight as you go.

Listening to a draft probably isn’t great for very large-scale revision questions. And it seems stronger for editing what is on the page rather than what isn’t. Still, it could have collateral benefits in these areas as well, prompting questions about organization and missing content. Listening to a draft is an investment of time (22:07 for a six-page double-spaced memo), but one that could be both interesting and beneficial.

Listen to the important legal authorities

Listening to a legal authority is another investment of time: 7:03 for the text of Fed. R. Civ. P. 56; 36:14 just for the majority opinion in World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson, 444 U.S. 286 (1980). But if a legal source is very, very important, it could be well worth the time to listen to the entire thing. You would know the document more thoroughly than if you simply read it silently and highlighted it. You could stop the reading and take notes. You could really hear language that was important or vivid and would therefore make a great quote in a piece of writing about that source.

This may be wishful thinking, but perhaps listening to a legal source could help with that elusive goal of “hearing what they’re not saying.” Expert legal readers can do this; law students learning to read cases are advised to notice what the court did not say or hold. (Linda Edwards’ Legal Writing: Process, Analysis, and Organization is one such text with this advice.)

By listening to a text, which is slower than reading, you have more time to run alternate scenarios of how the text might have been worded. Apart from using any app, reading the authority out loud in your own voice could be beneficial in related ways (maybe even more beneficial). Yet it also might be difficult to persevere through an entire legal document.

Voice Dream Reader could help with the necessary perseverance. It shows you the total reading time and you can see a circle progress through a timeline, orienting you to how much longer there is to go. This timeline could be another useful piece of information for revision purposes as well: if the text seems to drag and make unnecessary points, perhaps it could and should be shortened.

Caveats and conclusion

As mentioned above, here are the features I found most useful in Voice Dream Reader:

the ability to highlight text, or turn off highlighting
control over the rate of speech
premium voices
integration with Dropbox

A few critiques and caveats: Trying to move back and forth in a document was awkward and difficult for me. I did figure out how to bookmark certain moments and navigate among them, which was helpful. One of the sources I read was a PDF with footnotes. Voice Dream Reader did not know how to handle footnotes other than to plow through them in linear fashion. When it came to the bottom of the main text on a page, it then went immediately into the footnotes below.

This linear reading of text and footnotes was both awkward and helpful in a strange way. It was awkward because citations aren’t sentences and they sound just plain ugly. But listening to the footnotes was actually kind of helpful as well because it gave me a moment to listen less attentively and jot some notes about the main text. I didn’t totally tune out from the footnotes; the reading was slow enough that I could make notes on interesting sources to investigate later.

Another caveat: I am positive there are many other apps and web apps and software programs with similar functionality. I did not do a comprehensive search into alternative text-to-speech platforms. (There is a free version of Voice Dream Reader called Voice Dream Reader Lite. Apparently it reads in 300-word segments, after which you have to press “play” again to continue. I did not try out the lite version.) I did find this helpful in-depth review of Voice Dream Reader.

Using Voice Dream Reader revealed some interesting possibilities for bringing speech and listening into the analysis and writing process. If you have used a text-to-speech app such as Voice Dream Reader for your own listening, reading, and writing — especially in a law-related context — please share thoughts in the comments.

*Sidebar if you’re interested: Patrick Ellis — a lawyer and scholar with some serious coding skills — measured the “simplicity” of an oral argument by Supreme Court advocate and former Solicitor General Paul Clement by converting the recording to text and quantifying its readability. But some listening scholarship suggests that listenability and readability are not as closely related as one might think because nonverbal cues, attitudes, and presentation issues affect listenability in a way that readability formulas don’t take into account. See Glenn, Emmert, and Emmert, A Scale for Measuring Listenability: The Factors that Determine Listening Ease and Difficulty, 9 Int’l J. Listening 44 (1995) (“too many variables intervene that prevent unqualified use of reading measurements to test and evaluate the listenability of oral texts”).

Listening’s influence on writing

June 27, 2014June 30, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

When we talk about communication, we are talking about four basic channels:

Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing

Did you see a pattern in the color scheme here? The blue channels are receptive, and the red channels are productive. Listening and writing share the least in common, since listening is receptive and does not require literacy. Listening occurs in context with many additional cues, whereas writing must supply its own context.*

Yet my message here — for any lawyer or law student who wants to be a better legal writer, as well as legal writing professors — is that working on listening can contribute to stronger writing.

Listening at the outset

The social aspect of legal writing means listening is crucial. Whenever an writing assignment or project is delegated through spoken words, listening sets the stage for successful writing. In professional contexts such as law practice, “successful writing” may be defined in large part as whether the writing satisfies the expectations of the person giving the assignment. Effectively listening to that person as he or she gives the assignment is therefore an important aspect of effectively writing it.

Listen Like a Lawyer previously suggested a checklist for taking an assignment, itemizing the obvious points one needs to get out of such conversations as well as some of the more intuitive information to listen for. While listening at this stage doesn’t guarantee success, it’s hard to imagine how one could successfully complete the project without effectively listening first.

Listening to feedback

On the other end of the process — but still fundamentally social — another link between good listening and good writing is handling feedback. Effectively listening to feedback and incorporating it into future work is crucial for a writer’s growth and development. The legal writing scholarship offers a number of insights into how professors should give feedback to 1Ls and what challenges they are likely to face. These recommendations help students listen to what their professors/writing mentors have to say.

In law practice, however, attorneys most likely *are not* well trained to give writing feedback, either in writing or in person. Anyone ever receive back an entire page x-ed out and annotated with the lone word “awkward” or — my personal favorite — “revise”?

But maybe unskilled feedback is actually not the problem. The real key to feedback lies in the person receiving it, according to Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen in Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. These are the same folks who wrote Difficult Conversations, so you know they are onto something. Their book outlines the importance of feedback in every aspect of life and the most important reactive barriers to learning from feedback — namely reactions to the perceived truth of the feedback; reactions based on the relationship with the person giving the feedback, and reactions due to a threatened personal identity. (I am halfway through this book and have concluded EVERYONE SHOULD READ IT. Expect a longer blog post to follow about listening to feedback.)

“Listening” while writing?

While it’s pretty easy to see how listening contributes to the assignment and the feedback, what about the middle — the actual writing itself? This part of writing isn’t so social. There’s no one to listen to.

Or maybe there is. Communications scholar Sara Lundsteen and others have suggested that part of good writing means having a good dialogue with oneself while creating. Being able to articulate what you’re writing about and why is part of a healthy writing process, writes Lundsteen in Listening: Its Impact at all Levels on Reading and Other Language Arts (1979). And being able to “hear” your own writing and revise it as needed are aspects of a healthy writing process as well. Here’s one amazing writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, recommending that writers just listen to their own writing and notice how it sounds.

In contrast, stressing out about how much the professor or supervising lawyer is going to hate this piece of writing is not an effective “voice” to listen to when trying to write. Models of writing such as Betty Flowers’ “madman-architect-carpenter-judge” (widely promoted among lawyers by Bryan Garner) help writers hold the critical voice at bay, opening their thoughts to more constructive internal dialogue. Methods such as Professor Mary Beth Beazley’s concept of “private memos” (footnotes with the writer’s questions and notes) help manage a writer’s internal dialogue as well. Preserving one’s personal voice while learning the conventions of legal writing is the concern of scholars such as Andrea McCardle.

As the idea of internal dialogue demonstrates, “listening” is surprisingly difficult to define and inextricably intertwined with thinking. Here in the middle of the writing process, thinking as embodied and expressed in various ways — listening to your own internal voice, hearing the sound of your writing, reading your draft, speaking the words out loud, and writing some more — is what will make better writers and better writing.

***

*For support and a more in-depth discussion, writing professors should check out Irene Lurkis Clark’s article on LIstening and Writing.

I look forward to presenting about listening and writing at the upcoming 16th Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute. Co-presenter Professor Tami Lefko will discuss listening, professionalism, and law school pedagogy.

Listenability and readability

June 24, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

The essential difficulty with writing is “the curse of knowledge,” as Lisa Cron describes in her excellent book Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence. The writer is cursed with the knowledge of what he or she is trying to say — knowledge that the reader by definition does not share. This curse manifests in at least two ways:

On the one hand, the writer is so familiar with his subject that he glosses over things the reader is utterly clueless about. On the other, it’s way too easy for the writer to get caught up in the minutiae of how things “really work” and lose sight of the story itself.

Cron then takes a bit of a cheap shot, although maybe it’s deserved:

This is something that, for some reason, lawyers seem particularly prone to.

(Digression: Forgive this one moment. Cron’s book is great, and particularly great for any law student or lawyer interested in storytelling.)

Composition scholars and legal writing scholars have been talking about this “curse of knowledge” in different words for a long time. In this post I’m drawing in particular on an article by Irene Lurkis Clark, Listening and Writing, 3 J. Basic Writing 81 (1981), available at http://wac.colostate.edu/jbw/v3n3/clark.pdf. Professor Lurkis Clark did some interesting work with listening and writing that helps explain why and how listening can help build better writing.

A different way to describe the writer’s curse of knowledge is the problem of “writer-based prose,” a term coined by famous communications scholar Linda Flowers. Writer-based prose is bad because it assumes the reader already knows what the writer is trying to say. This kind of prose is an “‘unretouched and under processed version’ of the writer’s own thought.” Students must learn to produce “reader-based prose,” which entails a “deliberate attempt” to reach the reader using “shared language and context.”

Beginning legal writers face the double challenge of learning to use legal concepts and language with precision *and* writing about those concepts for a reader. The reader for our purposes is not just any reader, but a legal reader. Extensive legal writing scholarship explores these challenges and how to address them. A few key methods include reading excellent writing, following structured self-editing processes, reflecting on the writing process and written product, and obtaining/implementing meaningful feedback from peers, professors, supervising lawyers, and others.

Effective listening can help with effective writing too.

This is in part because language skills are integrated. Some scholars claim they are completely integrated (good reader = good writer = good listener = good speaker). Others take a more nuanced position, seeking to explore and define the boundaries between listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The extent of integration need not be resolved for listening to help a lawyer or law student wanting to write more effectively.

For example, reading your work out loud is something we are all told to do. Professor Lurkis Clark explored the composition theory behind this recommendation — namely that “listenability” and “readability” are closely related. Early work in listenability actually used readability scores to measure listenability, a method that has been questioned and refined since then.

Based on the connections between listenability and readability, Professor Lurkis Clark proposed that students listen to each other’s writing and share structured feedback. The idea is that beginning (non-legal) writers can build their reading comprehension skills and gain a stronger sense of audience. If students’ listening is stronger than their reading (which can be the case with unskilled writers), then critiques based on listening may be more advanced than those based on reading.

Lurkis Clark didn’t claim peer review by listening was a novel idea, but she sought to explore why it works and what it’s best suited to do. In this work and a subsequent experimental study of how evaluators scored text depending on whether they listened to it or read it, Professor Lurkis Clark concluded — not surprisingly — that listening is best for critiquing structure, content and audience appropriateness. She found a high correlation between scores assigned to a text by listeners and those assigned by readers of that same text. Taken in sum, her work validates the role of listening in what is, ideally, a virtuous spiral of developing communication skills:

One’s ability to listen . . . can enhance one’s ability to read, which, in turn, can enhance one’s ability to revise, which, finally, has significant implications for the production of coherent discourse.

Better writing through listening

June 23, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

This post begins a series on listening and writing.

Being a better listener can help with being a better writer. There are broad, non-law-specific reasons this is true, supported in the general communications literature. And there are law-specific reasons as well.

From the general literature: Listening is the foundation for speaking, which is the foundation for reading, which is the foundation for writing, writes Sara Lundsteen in Listening: Its Impact at All Levels on Reading and the Other Language Arts (1979). The initially crucial role of listening in this developmental process leads Lundsteen to posit: “Since listening is a foundation for writing, improving listening is likely to affect composition.”

Listening plays a role in writing skills in both an outward-facing and inward-facing way:

Listening in childhood builds vocabulary and the ability to generate complex sentences.
“Internal listening” is part of the writing process. Lundsteen gives the example of children talking to themselves when writing: “Let’s see, I’m going to write about a dog that ate a mean man.”

Problems with either type of listening could compromise the ability to generate strong writing. And strengths in these areas seem likely to correlate with strong writing.

The application to legal writing is pretty obvious. If a (legal) writer has a strong vocabulary and ability to generate complex sentences, that person’s (legal) writing is likely to be more advanced. Likewise, if a (legal) writer is able to engage a meaningful internal dialogue about writing (“now I’m going to address the other element”), the writing is likely to be stronger. While reading helps with all of the above — of course — reading alone seems insufficient. Listening to words in context and using those words in conversation with others, listening to how words are arranged in spoken sentences, and listening to one’s own ideas about what is worth communicating and how to make that happen — all of these forms of listening can enrich one’s writing.

The claim that better listening leads to better writing is difficult to prove, Lundsteen acknowledges. Several causes could make writing improvement difficult to discern: “complexity, the slow pace of such growth, and the imprecision in measurement of language arts skills.”

Yet this claim has an intuitive appeal, as she points out: “Not all problems [with language] are solved by using effective listening and reading, but it is doubtful that many are solved without help from these subskills.”

Why I Write

June 7, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Listen Like a Lawyer received an early birthday present: an invitation from Brian Rogers, a.k.a. the Contracts Guy, to participate in this blog hop on “why I write.” The end of Listen Like a Lawyer’s first year is the perfect time for reflection. One obvious benefit of blogging has been the chance to network with folks like Brian as well as those tagged at the end of this post for the next leg of the blog hop.

What am I working on?

I’m interested how listening can improve the work product and experience of lawyers, legal professionals, and law students. There is so much to say about it: models of listening from the communication scholarship; listening and ethics; the role of listening in various areas of practice; how listening helps marketing and networking; common listening breakdowns; specific aspects of listening as a skill; listening in the law school classroom; and so on.

Right now I’m focusing particularly on listening and summer associates, since it’s that time of year. Next I will be delving into the relationship between listening and writing, in preparation for the Legal Writing Institute’s biennial meeting in Philadelphia this summer.

How does my writing differ from others of its genre?

I aspire to the kind of writing that informs and entertains lawyers and other legal professionals as well as law students. This blog is only a year old and I’m still working on writing style and frequency of posting. Where my writing differs is in its specific focus on listening.

Listening plays a big role in professional success as a lawyer, yet the value and methods of listening don’t seem to get much attention in books, articles, and online content — at least when compared with the attention given to speaking and writing. Some excellent law review articles have been written about listening, and my friend Professor Tami Lefko is now writing about listening as well. Through researching the blog I have found some wonderful resources, many of which are listed in the Resources section of Listen Like a Lawyer. I’m also grateful for the guest speakers and writers (here and here) who have already contributed their thoughts. Lawyers’ enthusiastic response when they hear about Listen Like a Lawyer tells me that there is an appetite and a need for more.

Why do I write what I write?

My main goal and the biggest reason I write is a substantive one: to explore the topic of listening. From my experience as a journalist and practicing lawyer, I remember many professional successes based on part of good listening:

taking extensive notes on an interview, adaptable for sharing with others, with key phrases in quotations
observing witnesses’ revealing facial expressions and body language during depositions
participating in mediations and motions practice where the key to success was to “quit while you’re ahead”

And of course less successful moments where I could have listened better:

not picking up on what made a client angry about his situation and then ham-handedly repeating the trigger
interrupting a partner during lunch with a client
not differentiating when senior attorneys were loosely brainstorming versus when they were identifying their core strategies and priorities

I could also remember the satisfaction of working with senior attorneys who engaged with conversation with me as a junior attorney — as well as the frustration of meetings with certain senior attorneys during which their eyes would wander towards Microsoft Outlook. Was I talking too long or about the wrong things? Did they have urgent client business necessitating absolute e-mail vigilance? Or were they just addicted to their e-mail? Yes, yes, and yes. These questions are even more valid, and these tensions even more present, in today’s device-laden legal workplace.

Since leaving practice and over the past 13 years teaching legal writing, it has become apparent to me that part of students’ performance in law school is affected by their underlying skill at listening. Better listeners understand more information, catch its context, prioritize it better, and ask better questions. They also “read people” better and understand speakers’ attitudes toward their own statements with more subtlety. Thus they are more prepared for clinics, externships, and law practice.

In contrast, truly bad listeners — and most people aren’t this terrible, but here’s a worst-case scenario — don’t get all the information they need, don’t understand people’s reactions to events, don’t ask good questions, and come across as ineffectual or even rude.

And those are just the outward aspects of listening. There is also the inward aspect of effectively listening to oneself, which is closely related to emotional intelligence. Being able to hear — and manage — one’s inner voice is so important to lawyers and law students’ resilience and professional satisfaction.

On a selfish note, I write because I like to. Writing teachers think about writing so very much but often struggle for time to do their own writing. Starting a blog was a public commitment to write, kind of like signing up for a gym membership — and then posting about it on social media — as motivation to work out. So far it has been a good experience.

How does my process work?

I keep a file of ideas in Evernote, drawn from Twitter, Zite, and other sources. I have a large stack of textbooks, trade books, scholarship, and other sources that I refer to for questions and explore as time allows. I tend to write groups of several posts at a time, saving drafts and then coming back later to revise before publication.

Some posts draw more on my journalism background, like these profiles of lawyers dealing with hearing loss. Other posts are more scholarly in nature, like this exploration of cognitive bias. And sometimes I just try to be creative, like this “Tabata workout” for listening.

Please check out my blogging friends:

For the next leg of this blog hop, I’m highlighting three blogs, all by lawyers:

Lady (Legal) Writer is written by Megan Boyd, an adjunct professor of advanced legal writing at Mercer Law. Megan is smart and funny, and has fun with legal writing. Her blog shows it.

Dogs Don’t Eat Pizza is written by Karen Cooper, a lawyer and fantastic writer who is channeling her passion into the Do It Yourself community. Karen can choose a great paint chip just as easily as she chooses between “IRAC,” “TREAC,” and “CREAC.”

Connecticut Employment Lawyer is written by Daniel Schwartz. I don’t know a lot about Connecticut law, but I do know something about good writing. Exhibit A is anything Dan Schwartz writes. Twitter’s suggested follows led me to his blog, and his work impressed me so much that I asked him to for advice on some early posts from Listen Like a Lawyer. He took the time to read them and make suggestions — proving he’s a nice guy, too.

Checklists for listening

June 2, 2014 Jennifer Romig2 Comments

The checklist is a surprisingly simple yet effective tool for improving performance in fields from aviation to construction to medicine to law. Checklists help professionals catch what Dr. Atul Gawande, the chief evangelist of checklists in the workplace, calls “the stupid stuff.”

Checklists also assist with collaborative work on large, complex projects. Complex challenges may not have a right answer, but project-management-style checklists help teams communicate and collaborate efficiently to handle uncertainty and forge a path forward.

I’ve written about how checklists help legal writers (here and here and here). Professor Kathleen Elliot Vinson of Suffolk Law developed an iPhone app with legal writing checklists (reviewed by Bob Ambrogi here). Checklists can help lawyers and law students listen more effectively as well.

For example, a listening checklist should be very useful for face-to-face meetings to discuss a new assignment. During a face-to-face meeting, forgetting to talk about a key topic would fall under Gawande’s definition of “stupid stuff.” Running down the checklist at the end of a meeting can help ensure key topics are covered. This process minimizes inefficient interruptions and follow-ups later. It also maximizes the value of the initial face-to-face time. Click here for a sample checklist for summer associates and legal interns.

Listening checklists could also be useful for client intake meetings, prep sessions such as deposition or mediation prep, feedback on assignments, and so on. Checklists for lawyering tasks are not a novel idea, which raises the question: is a “listening checklist” really that different from a regular checklist of relevant tasks?

Just as a pilot has numerous checklists in the flight manual for a variety of scenarios, a lawyer may have a listening checklist for handling meetings and a different kind of checklist for preparing an SEC filing, for example. The categorical name of the checklist doesn’t matter, but Gawande’s great work on checklists, The Checklist Manifesto, teaches that a long, cumbersome, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink checklist is not a particularly good one. Any clear checklist that encourages efficient, effective communication is a valuable checklist for lawyers.

Thanks to Professor Tami Lefko for feedback on this post.

For law students: summer evaluations and listening

May 23, 2014 Jennifer Romig2 Comments

Name a skill that summer employers may or may not evaluate directly, but that can enhance performance on every skill they do evaluate.

Yes, it’s listening.

Most obviously, listening is relevant to the soft skills most employers are likely to evaluate. But listening also influences “harder” skills such as research and writing. And listening is certainly an aspect of a law student’s overall potential as a lawyer.

Soft skills

Soft skills are basically anything associated with “the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people.” Legal employers may evaluate soft skills in categories such as professionalism, courtesy, and general presence, just to name a few. Here are some examples of listening behaviors that may lead to strong evaluations of soft skills:

Never looking at your phone while talking with another attorney or client without a convincing explanation (e.g., “Excuse me for one moment. I’m waiting for partner x to let me know if I can attend the deposition right after this lunch.”)
Strong listening during any opportunities to observe events such as mediations and depositions (e.g. asking a senior attorney afterwards, “I noticed that the witness kept qualifying her statements with the words ‘as I sit here.’ Does that language mean something specific?”)
Active listening during lunch with a mentor (E.g., “You mentioned that your first year in practice was really challenging. What was hard for you?”)
Respectful behavior and body language during the evaluation process, especially with any constructive criticisms (e.g. keeping arms gently resting in one’s lap during a discussion of how an assignment could have been stronger)

Hard skills

Listening indirectly influences performance of hard skills such as fact-gathering and research and writing. Here are some examples of listening behaviors that may lead to strong evaluations of hard skills:

Noticing and asking about important information that a supervising attorney forgot to mention, such as the desired format for an assignment
Discerning what an assigning attorney’s word choice indicates about whether he or she thinks the assignment should be relatively easy or hard
Taking notes effectively during a meeting so that follow-up questions are kept to a minimum
Observing and understanding a fact witness’s body language and asking questions that follow up on an area where the witness may be hesitant to share information

Lawyering potential

Professors Marjorie Schultz and Sheldon Zedeck have generated a list of 26 “lawyering effectiveness” factors. These factors provide a useful outline of what makes a lawyer effective; thus, law students who show potential in these areas are showing potential to be an effective practicing lawyer. Listening is explicitly listed under the “communications” category, and it indirectly influences many others. Showing effective listening is thus likely to positively influence the overall evaluation of a law student’s potential as a lawyer.

The sounds of graduation

May 16, 2014 Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of celebrating graduation with another class of law students. Writing Listen Like a Lawyer has me thinking a lot about how lawyers and law students interact with conversation, voice, and sound. Thus I approached this year’s graduation with a particular focus on sound.

Graduation ceremonies are memorable for so many reasons. The sun rises, and faculty and students don their velvet-corded regalia. There is something about wearing that beret with the yellow tassel. Maybe the hat changes the way sound conducts into the ears? I can certainly hear the tassel brushing against the velvet whenever my head moves. Likewise the dark heavy fabric of the gown whispers with every movement.

And then there is the ceremony itself. At the law school where I teach, graduation always starts with a rousing prelude of bagpipes. If the true sign of intelligence is, as Fitzgerald said, the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind and retain the ability to function, then bagpipes are a musical intelligence test: screeching yet sonorous, grating yet glorious. When the pipers stop, their last hiss of muscular breath dies away. The silence that follows is sanctified.

And then, the speeches. Fed through a huge sound system, the voices echo as statements from the podium ring out through amplifiers. Experienced speakers project short sentences deliberately and then pause, letting those sentences expand and settle on the ears of hundreds or thousands in the audience. Inexperienced speakers — for example, students — may speak too quickly and audibly shuffle their notes at the podium. Yet their flushed faces and nervous laughter give us all a moment to appreciate youth and their accomplishment. The faculty and family laugh at their jokes and silently send well wishes toward them and all the graduates seated in rows.

And then there is the reading of the names. It is . . . interminable. Looking from page to page in the program to search where we are in the sequence, audience members including faculty sit, wriggle, writhe, fidget, and wait. One can see students, family, and faculty alike cycle between attentive body language, distracted fidgeting, and a kind of numb surrender. As the reading of the names goes on. Each name is so special to the person hearing it. And to their families and friends, of course. Of course. I absolutely love hearing my former students’ names. But together in minute upon minute upon minute, the names start to run together.

But then there are . . . the cowbells! And the ululations! And the kazoos and vuvuzelas! The sounds of celebration lend a festive air and give everyone a focus and even a chuckle among the onslaught of name after name after name. This year, the loving outburst from the audience: “That’s my sister!!!”

My student memories of graduation are more visual than auditory. I can remember how I checked my mortarboard in the mirror because it kept tipping, how the stages looked with speakers and administrators arrayed in their finery, and how the sun seemed to shine just a little bit brighter and the clouds to look a bit puffier than on another typical beautiful day. And to a degree, I can remember the essence of what they said. (Okay maybe not this speech, which somehow was bland enough to warrant coverage years later in the Onion.)

Although the sounds blur and are mostly forgotten, the sounds of the day contribute to a vivid sensory experience that makes a unique memory. And there is one word, repeated over and over in so many voices, in small groups and in large circles, in a parent or mentor’s murmur into the ear of a velvet-capped graduate: “Congratulations.”

Thanks to Jenn Mathews for reviewing an earlier version of this essay.