1st slide
Legal counseling, in the larger sense of the term, refers to the broad
range of consultation lawyers can provide clients. This may be in a
number of contexts (law offices, community boards, courtrooms)
and may involve a variety of functions (planning, advice, legal
action). In a narrower sense ..
Legal counsellor’s tasks are (considering the specific needs of the
client):
– provide opinions, explanations and answers to the legal questions;
– explain what kind of legal rules the client has to fulfill and analyze
the implementation;
– provide suggestions on how to ensure the legitimacy of her actions
and the means to protect her interests and rights;
– compose or take part of composing or formulating legal
documents;
– communicate with third persons in the interest of the client
including the public authorities and perform legal actions in the
interest of the client or the employer;
– represent and/or protect the customer outside the court, before
and during the trial.
2nd slide
Lawyers, in the normal conduct of their professional activity, are
servants to two masters whose interests may be contrasting. The
lawyer, in the purview of society upholds and properly implements
the law; but the lawyer also contracts with a client to serve the
latter's interests as best possible.
3rd slide
The counseling process is more subtle or more difficult than it might
appear to be. Clients are typically not directly interested in knowing
or upholding the law; their concern is how the operation of law does
or may affect them. Their need for a lawyer may involve, from their
point of view, the circumvention or subversion of law, or the
extension or elasticization of it, to ends that are questionable in the
pursuit of justice or in the upholding of principles of law.
One of the things that actually define the character of the person is
how he makes a decision. Or how he or she makes a choice.
Which brings us to the next slide which is
4th slide
The worst thing you can do to a lawyer is to lie.
When the client is being truthful that means you can judge if the
case is strong or not.
You would know when a client is being less than candid or is hiding
something
5th slide An Inquiry Into Legal Counseling Robert S. Redmount*
A degree of empathy appears essential in counseling if the counselor
is to be adequately concerned for and inquisitive about the client,
and if the client is to be reasonably open and cooperative with the
counselor. Counseling without empathy very often ignores the
human dimensions of experience and is likely to be a technical
exercise, sufficient for technical problems. The argument for
empathy in counseling is essentially an argument for caring but,
more than that, the quality of counseling-the quality of information-
sharing, investigation, advising, and decision-making-may depend
upon it.
6th slide
Listening is actually quite difficult to do effectively as it involves
deep mental analysis of what you have heard so that you can
identify the salient facts and identify relevant information, which
would help you make up the ultimate facts of the case and help you
identify the legal issue.
There is a need simultaneously to elicit and evaluate the reliability of
information, and to differentiate "hard" information from values,
biases, preferences, and similar attitudinal characteristics that
distinguish objective and subjective desiderata. Further, there is
information to be elicited relative to an immediate circumstance or
set of events, and there is other information that fills out a broader
framework in the client's experience and has more recessed but
perhaps broader implications. And there are also facts not yet fully
developed or not entirely clear and capable of articulation that need
to be recognized.
7th slide
Legal analysis, then, would seem to be the instrument that provides
both sense and direction for the resolution of client problems.
Effective questioning obtains the information you need in order to
provide the client with full and informed advice, which now bring us
to the next slide
8th slide
By combining the results of listening and questioning, you should be
able to identify what the client’s problems are, the laws, provisions,
or precedence applicable to the issue and what potential solutions
are available.
9th slide
The process is one first of suggestion and then of decision.
Suggestion invites reaction, sometimes reformulation and the
proffering of alternatives. It is instigative and aims at decision.
Decision, characteristically, involves commitment and a degree (but
only a degree) of finality in the counseling experience.
Legal counseling, characteristically being most often directed to
some reasonably clear purpose and largely objective circumstance,
may come off best in the decision-making phase of the counseling
process. Lawyers are able to be and are taught to be decisive.
10th slide
It is he who must draft a will or contract, file a complaint or an
answer, or whatever. In some instances, implementation may mean
to undertake a negotiation .
If decision is the ending process in most legal counseling then
implementation produces the end product. It typically produces a
viable result that encompasses and briefly expresses what has gone
before in the counseling process.
implementation is also the testing of a decision against subsequent
reality experiences and may retrospectively suggest flaws and
inadequacies in decision and implementation.