Client Interviewing Counseling And Decision Making

This book provides a practical approach to client interviewing, counseling, and decision-making. These are practical skills, not theoretical ones. Thus, the overall pedagogical approach taken by the text is to explain to students what to do and how to do it when engaging in interviewing, counseling, and decision-making with a client. This accords with the growing trend in law schools to de-emphasize heuristic theory in teaching practical skills and, instead, to teach those skills in simulated "real-life" contexts. Based on the guidance and techniques provided in the text, students will best learn the skills of interviewing and counseling by applying them in various role plays contained in the Teacher's Manual or through other role plays developed by their professor. Three other features of this book are worthy of mention: The book is deliberately designed to be short--to "get to the point," without unnecessary palaver. The book provides an extensive discussion of the most pertinent provisions of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct relating to client interviewing, counseling, and decision-making. The book discusses interviewing witnesses and counseling in certain special contexts, including counseling about settlement, counseling through the writing of opinion letters, counseling the client as a deponent, and counseling the criminal defendant.

"This book provides a practical approach to client interviewing, counseling, and decision-making. These are practical skills, not theoretical ones. Thus, the overall pedagogical approach taken by the text is to explain to students what to do and how to do it when engaging in interviewing, counseling, and decision-making with a client. This accords with the growing trend in law schools to de-emphasize heuristic theory in teaching practical skills and, instead, to teach those skills in simulated "real-life" contexts. Based on the guidance and techniques provided in the text, students will best learn the skills of interviewing and counseling by applying them in various role plays contained in the Teacher's Manual or through other role plays developed by their professor. Other features of this book that are worthy of mention: The book is deliberately designed to be short-to "get to the point," without unnecessary palaver. The book provides an extensive discussion of the most pertinent provisions of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct relating to client interviewing, counseling, and decision-making. The book discusses interviewing witnesses and counseling in certain special contexts, including counseling about settlement, counseling through the writing of opinion letters, counseling the client as a deponent, and counseling the criminal defendant. The new edition of the book adds sections addressing counseling about mediation, counseling about transactional matters, and the role of emotional intelligence"--

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.

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.

Over 450 data-based studies and years of field testing attest to the effectiveness of the Microskills model in INTENTIONAL INTERVIEWING AND COUNSELING: FACILITATING CLIENT DEVELOPMENT IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY, International Edition. This hallmark text enables students of many backgrounds to master basic skills in a step-by-step fashion, thereby rapidly empowering them to use listening and influencing skills as they conduct full interviews. Along the way, students are challenged to re-evaluate their current behaviors and perceptions. As a result, they gain valuable insight about themselves, their strengths, and the areas where they can develop further. By the time they finish reading the text, students will have the ability to adapt their skills to address both individual and multicultural uniqueness, conduct interviews using five different theoretical approaches, and be well on their way to developing a personalized style and theory of interviewing and counseling that matches their own aptitudes and affinities.

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).

In a successful litigation, it isn’t enough to know the facts. You must also know how to interpret and use those facts, and thoughtfully delving into the stories behind them is a crucial task if you hope to prevail for your client. Fact Investigation, by longtime NITA authors Paul Zwier and Anthony Bocchino, will change the way you approach cases for the rest of your career. Every litigator’s investigation begins where the “official” investigation ends. During informal fact investigation, you must know how to engage your client so he shares the facts and stories critical to his case, then use them not just to develop but to implement a winning case theory. How do you do that? It all starts with your first meeting with your clientand what you say and how you do it. Find out how your word choice and body language lay the groundwork for connecting with your client, and how to establish the openness and trust that yield what you need to build a compelling case and be a persuasive advocate. From that client information, the authors take you through the steps necessary to build and implement effective alternative case theories that will inform your fact investigation process and lay the foundation for efficient use of formal discovery devices. Zwier and Bocchino model these practice skills through four familiar NITA case files: Quinlan v. Kane Electronics (business/contract case), Brown v. Byrd (auto accident and personal injury case), State v. Lawrence (criminal robbery case), and United States ex rel. Rodriguez v. Hughes (False Claims Act case). When you see these techniques modeled as case studies, you understand how to integrate them into your overall case planning and learn how to confront the thorny ethics of day-to-day lawyering. The Second Edition is fully revised, with special emphasis on the impact of the proposed Federal Rules Civil Procedure changes, and features an important new chapter on e-discovery. Rare is now the case that doesn’t involve some form of electronic evidence, and every litigator must know the ever-expanding issues surrounding it. Find out how e-discovery strategies differ from plaintiff to defendant and how to manage your client’s competing rights to both speech and privacy in our highly discoverable online world. From explaining how to use your opposing party’s social media indiscretions against it to helping you make sense of new federal rules that limit the use of electronic evidence, Zwier and Bocchino tell you everything you must know about the impact of e-discovery on the modern litigation practice.

This book takes a collaborative approach to legal interviewing and counseling. It suggests that clients will be best served when lawyers and clients work together to resolve problems. Under a collaborative decision-making model, the client controls most decisions, but the lawyer structures the process and provides advice in a manner that is likely to yield wise decisions. The Counselor-at-Law explores the major approaches to legal interviewing and counseling and outlines the available research on the psychology and the sociology of clients and lawyers. This book explores communication and decision-making theory, memory and recall, power and submission, personality types, and ethics. From this base, the authors construct a model of interviewing and counseling based on the techniques that are effective in real-life encounters. They also include psychological type theory and explain how it can be used to improve a lawyer's communication, interviewing, and counseling skills. This innovative casebook provides students with a template for effective legal interviewing and counseling. The most effective legal counselors are the ones instilled with respect for the client, cognizant of building rapport, aware of the psychological dynamics of the lawyer-client relationship, and equipped with technical communication skills to gather information without sacrificing rapport.

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