Lawyer-client Interaction Research Articles

Agency and vulnerability in the field of immigration law: a linguistic‐ethnographic perspective on lawyer–client interaction

AbstractMigrants are often perceived as a group of vulnerable victims, especially within a legal context such as the one in this study: lawyer–client consultations in the field of immigration law. The literature describes how institutional limitations often translate into asymmetric lawyer–client dynamics. The linguistic‐ethnographic data gathered for this study shows, however, that the reality is more complex. In operationalizing the concept of agency, this study focuses on the dynamic‐relational nature of power differences, which implies a move away from the binary conceptualization of structure and agency. The ethnographic lens helps to unpack agency and reveals a picture of strategic behaviour that is contextually embedded and multi‐layered. In this light, the performance of agency and vulnerability is shown to be (1) interactionally achieved, (2) indicative of an awareness of macro‐level processes, and (3) reflective of the philosophy behind the authorities’ migration management.

Relationships between workplace characteristics, psychological stress, affective distress, burnout and empathy in lawyers

ABSTRACT Recent studies indicate that lawyers are at greater risk of experiencing stress, anxiety, depression and burnout symptoms than other occupational groups and the general population. Opinion pieces have suggested that workplace culture and law practice characteristics can explain the distress. However, no empirical studies have considered the potential impact of the factors on lawyer’s mental health or evaluated the potential impact of lawyer’s mental health on their clients. Empathy is an essential component of legal practice especially during client interactions; and prior research in doctors has shown that stress, anxiety, depression and burnout are associated with low empathy. This study examined the relationship between workplace characteristics, psychological stress, affective distress (i.e. anxiety, depression), burnout and empathy in lawyers. Private practice and in-house lawyers (n = 200) completed a questionnaire asking about work-stress, supervisor and organisational support, stress, affective distress, burnout and empathy. Analyses showed that psychological stress and burnout in lawyers was related to greater work-stress and a lack of perceived organisational support, and in turn, psychological stress and burnout were associated with low empathy in lawyers. Results suggest that stressful and unsupportive workplaces may contribute to stress, affective distress and burnout in lawyers that may have implications for lawyer-client interactions.

Bewertungen sprachlichen Handelns und good practice in der Angewandten Gesprächsforschung

AbstractThe article focuses on methodological issues of practice-oriented discourse research and suggests several methodological approaches to assess conversational practice. It makes an argument for the relevance of assessing conversational practice and for why aspects of good practice should be included more systematically in the analyses by way of considering objectives in the examined practice domains. We provide examples of different institutional fields (mostly doctor-patient and lawyer-client interaction) and discuss how actual communicative practices can be assessed with methods of discourse analysis. We thus aim to expand the methodological spectrum of conversation research by including matters of immediate social interest and aspects that are relevant for practitioners.

Navigating Immigration Law in a “Hostile Environment”: Implications for Adult Migrant Language Education

In this article the author analyses the communicative demands placed on migrants navigating immigration law in a fast‐moving policy environment and implications for adult migrant language education. Data are from an ethnographic study of a lawyer, Lucy, and her clients at a legal advice service in Leeds, England, and include interviews and recordings of lawyer–client interactions. The analytical focus is on Lucy’s stance (Jaffe, 2009b), on how she presents herself as an ally of her multilingual clients, and on the stance‐marking strategies she and her clients use as they strive to make meaning. The study took place in 2016, a time of volatility for the policies that impinge on immigration law and on legal interaction for migrants: the upsurge of right‐wing populist movements in Europe, erratic positions on migration in the United States, and the referendum that decided the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. The author maintains that the link is rarely drawn between interaction in legal and other institutional settings and the content of language classes designed to aid adult migrant settlement, and argues for an approach to adult migrant language education that critically addresses this point.

The pragmatics of legal advice services in a community legal centre in Australia: domination or facilitation?

There are 220 community legal centres in Australia, many of which work on a selfhelp model that entails volunteer lawyers giving advice to clients who will then under take their own legal work. This discourse analytic study explores the discursive interaction between volunteer lawyers and clients in a community legal centre in Brisbane. The analysis investigates the presence of authoritarian versus participatory strategies in order to look at the type of power relation present in their interaction. Two discursive features that characterise lawyer–client conversations were identified as being significant in this type of free advice session: register (formal-technical/informal) and interruptions. The results show that the lawyers tend to make less use of power-related strategies than has been seen in previous studies. Instead, they use a discourse of facilitation (participatory discourse) that is expressed in their register in the form of politeness strategies, use of colloquial language and expressions of support; and in their interruptions in the form of co operative overlapping speech. It is discussed that the use of these discursive features fits with the nature of these particular interactions. That is, the legal advice offered in community legal centres could be viewed as more of an ‘expert advice giving’ rather than a traditional lawyer–client interaction.

Perceptions of Fairness and Satisfaction in Lawyer–Client Interactions Among Young Offenders in Hong Kong

This study used a mixed methods approach to examine the perceptions of fairness and satisfaction young offenders have toward their lawyers in the Hong Kong criminal justice system, drawing on procedural justice theory. A sample of 168 young offenders aged between 14 and 21 years old was surveyed. Regression analyses indicated that participants who had private lawyers were more satisfied compared to those who had duty lawyers. Two elements of procedural justice, participation, and trustworthiness, demonstrated the strongest influence on youths’ satisfaction with their lawyers. Supplementary interviews with 30 young defendants further explained the discrepancy, revealing that the limited amount of time spent by duty lawyers in meetings and their detached focus contributed to clients’ low perceptions of participation and trustworthiness.

Mediation in Legal English Teaching

Abstract Mediation is a language activity that has been unjustly neglected when preparing law students for their future professional careers. When trained in a professional context, students need to develop and improve complex communicative skills. These include not only the traditional language skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking, but also more advanced skills such as summarizing, providing definitions, changing registers etc. All these are involved in the students’ acquisition of ‘soft skills’ that are particularly important for students of law since much of their future work involves interpersonal lawyer-client interaction. This article argues that mediation is a crucial (though previously underestimated) skill and that law-oriented ESP instruction should provide training aimed at developing this skill. Showing a practical application of this approach, the paper demonstrates that mediation can be successfully integrated in the legal English syllabus and make the learning of legal English more effective.

Young people's perception of lawyers in Hong Kong: A comparison between offenders, youth-at-risk and students

Young people in Hong Kong are more likely than any other age group to come into contact with the justice system. Despite this, there is a paucity of research on youth attitudes toward lawyers. The aim of this study was to compare the understanding and perceptions of lawyers among three youth groups classified according to experience in instructing lawyers and varying degrees of delinquency – young offenders (the only group who had experience of hiring lawyers), youth-at-risk and students (N = 1157), and to determine if perceptions of lawyers affect views on the legitimacy of the justice system. Students showed greater understanding about lawyers and more favorable perceptions of fairness in lawyer–client interactions compared with young offenders and youth-at-risk. A better understanding of lawyers had a positive association with perceptions of fairness and a higher perception of fairness had a positive association with legitimacy of the justice system. Recommendations are also discussed.

Exploring Lawyer–Client Interaction

Personal injury victims involved in compensation processes have a worse recovery than those not involved in compensation processes. One predictor for worse recovery is lawyer engagement. As some people argue that this negative relation between lawyer engagement and recovery may be explained by lawyers’ attitude and communications to clients, it seems important to investigate lawyer–client interaction. Although procedural justice and therapeutic jurisprudence had previously discussed aspects relevant for lawyer–client interaction, the client’s perspective has been rather ignored and only few empirical studies have been conducted. In this qualitative study, 21 traffic accident victims were interviewed about their experiences with their lawyer. Five desirable characteristics for lawyers were identified: communication, empathy, decisiveness, independence, and expertise. Communication and empathy corresponded with aspects already discussed in literature, whereas decisiveness, independence and expertise had been addressed only marginally. Further qualitative and quantitative research is necessary to establish preferable lawyer characteristics and to investigate what would improve the well-being of personal injury victims during the claims settlement process.

Orientations to Law, Guidelines, and Codesin Lawyer–Client Interaction

Central to criminal defense case processing are lawyer–client interactions in which texts (law, codes, or guidelines) are invoked and from which texts (case records) are constructed. From interactions with clients, lawyers construct case records that document the client's account of the event in question, records that are later used as the basis of further interactions. In interactions, lawyers invoke law, codes, and guidelines to intimate possible obstacles in the evidence or defenses in the law and furthermore, to justify, repudiate, or explain different courses of action. In these ways, lawyers' orientations to law, codes, and guidelines demonstrate the purposes guiding criminal defense work.

Comment?Bad News and Good News: Losing vs. Finding the Phenomenon in Legal Settings

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).

Testing Theory and Debunking Stereotypes: Lawyers’ Views on the Practice of Law

This article is the final report of a study of legal ethics and professionalism involving in depth interviews about problem solving conducted with nearly two hundred lawyers practicing in various settings: in different sizes of firms, in different sizes of communities, in private practice and in in-house or corporate counsel positions. Previously published findings of this research project having established that lawyers rarely turn to their ethical codes to solve problems, preferring instead to rely upon informal information gleaned from within their own offices (although lawyers from smaller firms remain more often comfortable with information drawn from beyond the firm than those from larger firms), this article focuses on analysis of the interviews of those lawyers who identified themselves as concerned with issues involving their roles as lawyers. The analysis maps the lawyers' own descriptions of their situations onto the “hired gun” and “counselor” models of lawyer-client interaction taken from the literature. The findings confirm our preliminary findings that these two roles are not mutually exclusive. Although all the lawyers concerned with their roles began in a mentoring mode, most lawyers eventually relinquished their decision-making to their clients, a transition fraught with challenges for many of them. A minority, however, despite the dictates of their code of ethics, withdrew from cases or even, exceptionally, substituted their own decision-making for that of their clients. The article links the mentoring model to the care perspective in the literature of moral development and the hired gun model to the rights perspective. The findings did not establish any support for the claim that the presence of women is creating a "softer" voice in the legal profession. However, two aspects of the structure of the profession, private practice versus in-house practice and the size of the centre in which the practice is located, engendered variations in professional attitudes.

Gendered Lawyering: Difference and Dominance in Lawyer-Client Interaction

This article addresses the debate about the significance of gender differences by analyzing patterns of interaction between lawyers and clients. It examines features of the language of lawyers and clients associated with the dominance and difference paradigms that are at the center of feminist theory. Talk characterized by dominance includes the control of discourse space, interruptions, topic control, and challenges. Features associated with a particular female “voice” include cooperative responses, affiliative requests, indirection, politeness, and the expression of emotion. Results show that women lawyers' talk is role behavior rather than gendered behavior, with little difference between men and women lawyers. Clients' speech is tempered by gender considerations, with both men and women clients expressing greater deference to men lawyers and women clients expressing cooperation and solidarity with all lawyers. It was mainly in reference to the occasional willingness to grant legitimacy to the clients' emotional concerns, as well as the stress on professional identity, that marked women lawyers' specific style of lawyering.

What Do Dutch Lawyers Actually Do in Divorce Cases?

This paper summarizes the findings of a four-pronged research project concerning the behavior of Dutch divorce lawyers, in which lawyers, judges, and clients were interviewed and lawyer-client interaction directly observed. In the first part, some preliminary remarks are made on the practical and theoretical importance of the actual behavior of divorce lawyers and the existing body of research on lawyer behavior. These are followed by a thumbnail sketch of Dutch divorce law and procedure and the role of the lawyer. The second part gives an overview of our own research findings. In the third part, I present some reflections on the role of lawyers in divorce cases: (1) the character and special place of ‘normative, conflict-oriented intervention’ in divorce conflict; (2) lawyers' objective of a ‘reasonable divorce’ and the nonadversarial approach of lawyers to divorce litigation; (3) lawyers as two-way ‘transformation agents’ between the client and the law; and (4) what lawyers actually do and do not do.

Challenge and control in lawyer-client interaction: A case study in an Israeli Legal Aid office

Challenge and control in lawyer-client interaction: A case study in an Israeli Legal Aid office

Obstacles to the Study of Lawyer-Client Interaction: The Biography of a Failure

This paper reports on an attempt by an interdisciplinary team to observe and record on tape lawyer-client interaction in the metropolitan Boston area in 1975-77. Current pressure for greater accountability to the public on the part of the legal profession makes the empirical, observational study of lawyer-client relations a timely, important topic. Despite the investment of much time and energy in creating conditions suitable for such a study, the project team failed to gain access to private lawyer-client encounters. The goal of the paper is to try to account for this failure, to analyze the nature of the obstacles encountered, and to stimulate speculation on how these obstacles might be overcome in the future. It is suggested that the doctrine of attorney-client privilege is the major obstacle which researchers must overcome. The idea of paying attorneys for their cooperation is also considered.

Comment on “Obstacles to the Study of Lawyer-Client Interaction: The Biography of a Failure”

Brenda Danet and her colleagues have made a valuable contribution to identifying some of the problems that inhibit effective research by social scientists into lawyer-client interaction. The title, Obstacles to the Study of Lawyer-Client Interaction: The Biography of a Failure (hereafter referred to as Biography), is apt. The researchers tried diligently and at considerable cost to observe lawyers working with clients. Much to their surprise, they failed totally to do so. The Biography is a post-mortem. Considering why the research project failed brought to mind an important new publication by Lindblom and Cohen in which they observe: In public policy making, many suppliers and users of social research are dissatisfied, the former because they are not listened to, the latter because they do not hear much they want to listen to (1979: 1). The Biography appears to reflect this reciprocal frustration. The authors failed to reach the lawyers they hoped to observe. I suspect one reason was that the lawyers approached had considerable difficulty understanding just what the social researchers were up to. I know that I do, reading their postmortem.