The importance of feeling heard

When was the last time that you felt heard? When was the last time that someone really focused on you and listened to what you were saying? It would seem that this is not something that human beings naturally do for each other.

If your client was asked about you, their lawyer, would they describe you as someone who really listens?

When you think about your client's journey or your workflow do you think about how your client feels, whether they feel heard, whether they feel fully engaged with the process? At the end of the day the fundamental job of a lawyer is to listen. Now for most of us we are listening, but does the client feel heard?

The difficulty of family law

The fundamental problem when you are taking instructions in a family law matter is that the client has, by definition, been through the breakdown of a significant relationship. Their view on what is important, and what the Court should think is important, is (in most cases) very different to your view and the Court's view of what is important.

This inevitably leads to you interupting them to seek clarification on an issue that is important from a family law perspective. This can make them feel that you either are not listening or that you are missing the point. I have tried many tricks to deal with this over the years, like making a list of questions and coming back to them later. The problem is that your questions are not highlighting what they think is important, because your questions are often very data driven and their relationship was driven not by data but by emotion.

Unfortunately those data driven questions also often come at hte beginning of your new relationship with this client and become part of that first impression.

Why does this matter?

In the Office of the Legal Services Commissioner's 2019 report it was noted that more complaints were received in relation to family and de facto law matters than any other area of law. Interestingly complaints in relation to deceased estates (covering wills, powers of attorney, probate and family provision claims) are the next most common. The reason I found this interesting is that what these two areas of law have in common is usually a break down of familial relationships.

The most commonly made formal complaints, across all complaints received, related to negligence, followed by poor communication and then overcharging. Interestingly, in telephone enquiries the most common complaints were communication, overcharging, and then negligence.

What is important to your client?

Now I appreciate that most family lawyers (and other professionals in other areas) have far loftier goals than not being sued. I am asking you to treat this negative feedback as an indication of what is important to the client. If you look at it like that then what is important to the client is that you do your job well, you listen, and you charge the right amount.

If you Google the importance of being heard or the importance of listening then you will find all sorts of research suggesting that failing to listen, or people feeling that they were not heard is a major cause of relationship breakdown. The client sitting in front of you has just been through a relationship breakdown, assume for a second that their communication with their most significant other has been broken for some time. They are probably more likely than most to feel that you are not listening if that is how they have been treated.

They are therefore primed to assume that you have not listened. Now in practice you are listening, you don't survive very long as a lawyer if you don't listen. At the end of the day our profession is prefaced on the basis that we act on the instructions of another. We listen, but does the client know that? Do they think your emphasis of something that seems unimportant to them is a reflection of a failure to hear them telling you what is important?

Feeling heard can be empowering

When was the last time that you felt heard? When was the last time that you felt truly listened to? It is memorable when it happens.

There is so much research on the importance of feeling heard but I found this research relating to a study in 2012 dealing with the Palestine and Israel conflicnt to be particularly interesting. What they found was that when individuals were given a chance to share their stories and experiences with people from the other side, it helped improve their attitude about the “opposing group.” This effect was even stronger when it was a member of the “disempowered group” being heard by someone from the “dominant group.”

In a client interview you are normally the dominant group, you are the gateway to the solution or justice that your client seeks. You can empower your client by making them feel heard, even if you don't agree with them. Furthermore you need that client to listen to you later, when you inevitably have to give them advice that they don't want to hear. This needs to be a two way relationship with both sides communicating not just so that the client feels empowered but so that you can do your job well.

Your workflow can have soft skills

When we think about workflow we tend to think about very dry things like efficiency and effectiveness, saving time or reducing frustration for staff. Have you ever though about what your workflow communicates to a potential client? Have you ever thought about how someone feels going through the workflow?

If you drew a map of your workflow and then put yourself in the client's shows and stepped through it, at what point do you think you get the opportunity to truly tell the full story to your lawyer? Do you think that should be earlier in the client relationship? How long do you think that should take?

The hard thing about this for a lawyer is always that we charge for our time and the client doesn't want to pay more money than they have to. They want you to do a good job, they want you to hear them, but they don't want to pay a lot of money to do it. For this reason it is important for your to automate the parts that can be automated so that you can focus the client's money on the stages that cannot be automated.

In the context of client intake the stages that cannot be automated are listening and the actual giving of advice. These are also the stages where you get the best opportunity to show your client how you can add value, and to encourage your client that you are indeed the lawyer for them. What if you took all of the data collection parts and automated those so that the client interaction with you was based around these two things, listening and adding value to the matter.

Old workflow

My old workflow in family law matters for client intake looked something like this, with almost all of these stages completed by me or a coworker:

• Initial enquiry
• Make appointment with client
• Explain process and estimated cost to client
• Initial consult to gather basic information like dates, children's details, and contributions
• Emails to and fro gathering financial information
• Input all the data into your spreadsheet
• Further consultation to provide better advice and clarify instructions

This workflow involves a lot of dry stages. What if you used automation to take care of the dry stages so that you could focus your time, and your first impression with the client, on doing the actual value added and human being required legal work?

My new workflow

My new workflow allows me to focus my time on the more human parts of the process, namely the initial telephone call with the client and then a first consultation. My first consultation is not spent collecting data. The automated intake and the client portal have already done that. I have let a robot take part of the robotic feeling parts, so now I can focus on forming a positive relationship with this new client and showing them how I add value to the process.

Of all the features in our product the client intake process is definitely my favourite. If you want to know more about it then you can read more here.