Effective Communication Skills In Legal Practice

Effective communication skills are essential in legal practice. The elements of listening, feedback and questioning skills demonstrate respect, understanding and facilitate effective advocacy. Listening skills create a connection between the solicitor and client, and helps communicate respect and interest in their issues. Understanding can also be demonstrated by giving the client feedback, while also encouraging them to share relevant information. Questioning is important to facilitate effective advocacy because it is essential to obtain the problem’s details and have specific instructions in order to represent their client effectively. These skills in combination allow solicitors to be effective in their roles and be a comprehensive asset …show more content…
These transactions allow people to build mutual understandings and create shared meaning (Wood 2013). These feedback transactions can include a smile or spoken words, or even an objectively presented award (Eunson 2012). Feedback is important in legal practice because it demonstrates understanding while also encouraging clients to share relevant information. It is important that a client feels valued and that their issue is reasonable; people are often intimidated by the prospect of seeing a lawyer, that they will be heavily judged by a highly intelligent individual (Hyams, Campbell & Evans 2014). Utilising feedback can generate shared understanding and a connection between lawyer and client. Following and reflecting, from Wolski’s subcategories of listening (Wolski 2009), both constitute feedback. Following skills are essentially statements and questions by the listener that indicates to the speaker that they are following (Lewis, Kyrou & Dinelli 2004), but which do not direct the conversation away from that which the speaker intends. Utilisations of this include brief agreeing interjections like “I see” or open questions such as “I’d like to hear more.” These communicate interest and attentiveness without getting in the speaker’s way, often leading to the client sharing more than otherwise (Lewis, Kyrou & Dinelli 2004), assisting the lawyer in understanding the problem. Reflective responses differ to following in that they provide the speaker feedback in what they have communicated in a mirror-like fashion (Wolski 2009). By providing a client a paraphrased and concise account of their events, information can be checked for accuracy and misunderstandings corrected. This also removes inflammatory aspects and exaggerations in a message to identify the real concerns and obtain accurate instructions (Hyams, Campbell &