Abstract
In his review article, Max Travers observes that, although an approach like mine in Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Medical Settings , “could be used to investigate the delivery of news in legal settings,” no such studies “have so far been published.” He is right about that, but in 1998, Linda F. Smith (1998, 409–10), exploring situations in which lawyers may need to tell their clients bad news, reviewed medical studies on this topic. Extrapolating from the medical literature, Smith proposed how attorneys can deliver bad news while allowing clients to have more influence over their own cases during the legal process. Judging from Smith’s recommendations, “bad news” is a phenomenon in legal settings and in the interactions between attorneys and clients. I will say more about what I mean by phenomenon shortly. Given the lack of research on this phenomenon in these settings, Smith is forced not only to draw analogies between medicine and law, but also to rely on movie portrayals of lawyerclient interaction, such as those in Philadelphia, A Few Good Men , and Kramer vs. Kramer . Film is transparently an unreliable guide about real-worldly interactions, of course. Additionally, in an empirical sense, medical resources are suspect in that most, including Buckman’s (1992) very fine Breaking Bad News —upon which Smith (1998) depends heavily for making recommendations to legal practitioners—are overwhelmingly based upon clinical anecdote rather than systematic investigation or theoretical foundation (Ptacek and Eberhardt 1996).
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