Legal Interviewing And Counseling

Concerned with how lawyers can interact with clients to help them solve their legal problems. Deals specifically within the context of dispute resolution cases. Within the context of that litigation, the book examines the task which lawyers must perform and the skills they must have in order to be effective counselors. The authors provide a description of the objectives of the legal interviewing and counseling processes; the forces which motivate clients to participate in these processes; and the basic techniques which are needed to successfully achieve the goals of legal interviewing and counseling.

Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling examines practical and theoretical challenges lawyers face with clients. Each chapter explores a critical issue in interviewing and counseling, such as developing connection across difference, dealing with atypical clients, and using engaged client-centered counseling. Ellmann, Dinerstein, Gunning, Kruse, and Shelleck investigate these issues primarily through detailed analysis of lawyer-client conversations, which invite the reader to consider and critique the lawyer's choices. A key theme is "engaged client-centered lawyering," which emphasizes the importance of client choice and the impact of lawyers on clients, and affirms lawyers' ability to achieve wise engagement with clients.

Lawyers know that client counseling can be the most challenging part of legal practice. Clients question and often resist the complexities and uncertainties inherent in law and legal process. Honest advice from the lawyer can make a client doubt his or her allegiance and zeal. Client backlash may be directed at the lawyer who communicates bad news. Thus, the lawyer may feel torn between the obligation to clearly inform a client about weaknesses in legal positions and fear of damaging the client relationship. Too often, the lawyer struggles to counsel a particularly difficult client, but to no avail. Client Science is written to provide insight and advice to lawyers on how to more effectively communicate with their clients with regard to legal realities and difficult decisions. It will help lawyers with the always-difficult task of delivering "bad news," which will result in better-informed and thus more satisfied clients. The book explains applicable social science research and insights and translates them into plain language relevant to legal practice and client counseling. Marjorie Corman Aaron offers specific suggestions related to a lawyer's ordering, timing, phrasing, and type of explanation, as well as style adjustments for the lawyer's voice, gesture, and body position, all to impact client counseling and to improve the lawyer-client relationship.

The Third Edition of this pathbreaking text expands the principles of client-centered lawyering into areas not explored in previous editions. It newly covers: transactions involving non-profit organizations (Chapter 9); counseling of corporations and loosely structured community action groups (Chapter 21); and the interviewing and counseling of defendants charged with criminal offenses (Chapters 10 and 22).

The purpose of this book is to help law students to develop and practice communication skills in the context of client interviewing and counselling.

This up-to-date book includes recent research and scholarship in all four skills: interviewing, counseling, negotiation, and fact analysis. Drawing on years of teaching experience, The author show students how to organize, analyze, and marshal facts into powerfully persuasive arguments. This Highly-Effective Text Offers: a unique emphasis on fact analysis that shows students how to recognize, organize, and utilize the persuasive value of facts, with new charts, illustrating factual patterns and organization expert instruction in essential legal skills from a highly experienced author team, covering the basics of problem solving, interviewing, counseling, and negotiating a streamlined, example-driven presentation minimizing theoretical digressions, and instead, drawing students into real case situations and problem-solving scenarios consistent attention to ethical concerns, alerting students to issues of moral and professional conduct wherever appropriate This New Edition Also Features: three new chapters: Communication Skills, Cross-Cultural Issues, and Fact Investigation focus on professionalism that includes working with clients, problem-solving with adversaries, and reflecting on core issues and more examples from criminal law, The area of the law most familiar to first-year students thorough coverage of the skills involved in both adversarial and problem-solving negotiation

This book provides a comprehensive descriptive and prescriptive treatment of legal counseling, interviewing, and negotiation (including mediation and plea-bargaining). As reflected in the title, the book takes "a practical approach" to these skills, so students can learn specifically how to engage in effective counseling and negotiating. The book also emphasizes pertinent ethical and legal considerations in connection with counseling clients and negotiating settlements. The authors discuss leading "theoretical approaches" to the extent those approaches can be meaningfully applied in practice. The overall effect is to emphasize that blend of theory, practice, ethics, and law that is most meaningful in the sense of having real-life application to effective client representation. The Appendices to the book provide numerous negotiation and mediation, including plea-bargaining, role-plays. Interviewing and counseling role-plays are provided in a separate Teacher's Manual (available only to professors), which also includes the "confidential instructions" for the negotiation, mediation, and plea bargaining role-plays. This book also is available in a three-hole punched, alternative loose-leaf version printed on 8.5 x 11 inch paper with wider margins and with the same pagination as the hardbound book.

In today's world, lawyers tend to become identified more with law and less with people, the public interest, social welfare and the common good. However, many lawyers are sensitive, people-oriented professionals who relate to their clients as persons and not as problems. The authors argue that counseling is the heart and soul of lawyering, and that it is an integral part of the legal education.