This year, I have been devoting my messages to the ways that a great attorney’s “voice” can shape his or her relationship with listeners. In my concluding message of this series, I would like to focus on my experience of how outstanding lawyers deliver news. How they deliver bad news. And how they deliver good news.
The reason I want to concentrate on that
particular feature of the lawyer’s voice is because it is one that I often hear
mentioned in a particular context.
Each year, several times a year, I host lunches at the Law School in a
series that I call “the Dean’s Forum.”
In a typical Dean’s Forum, ten or fifteen students have lunch with a
lawyer who is now running a business.
The lawyer speaks about career path. Frequently, the lawyer speaks about what it is like to be a
client.
Often a student will ask our graduates
what they think distinguishes a good lawyer from a bad lawyer. As often as not, the response concerns
the way the lawyer delivers news.
The easiest examples concern the delivery
of bad news. By bad news, I mean
news of the form, “the course of action you describe may well be illegal or
would expose you to civil liability.”The best lawyers seem to know intuitively
that the delivery of such news is a delicate art indeed.
Most of us have had the experience of
seeing a lawyer deliver bad news with glee, or if not with glee then at least
as a contemptuous scold. We know
how detrimental that tone can be to the client’s vision of the law, and of the
legal profession.
But I have also had many opportunities to
see gifted lawyers deliver bad news with astonishing skill. It has been fifteen years since I was
in practice, but I retain a vivid memory of how a lawyer I worked with used to
prepare himself to deliver bad news.
As I reflect on that preparation, I believe that today I have a deeper
appreciation of why his clients valued his counsel so much.
First, he would try to present a legal
obstacle or a legal risk in a matter-of-fact way. Not as a matter of profound injustice or unfairness that
gave cause for whining and tirades against the legal system, but as a feature
of the world no different from the existence of a competitor with a high
quality product. A challenge to be
overcome.
Second, he would try to show the client
that he was an ally in a larger endeavor.
Invariably, that meant helping the client to think about how the same
ends might be achieved through alternative means. A different, safer path through the forest.
The delivery of good news can sometimes
present a very different challenge.
This challenge is not to sustain the client’s ability to be
effective. It is to sustain the
client’s sense of the law as a system worthy of respect.
When a lawyer discovers a clever solution
to a problem, it is natural to want credit for cleverness. But as my mentor showed me, the best
lawyers are able to claim credit not for manipulating a system that has no
integrity, but rather for understanding the nuanced complexity of a legitimate
feature of the business environment.
The difference may be subtle at times, but this ability to present good
news in a way that respects the law was essential to his ability to present bad
news effectively.
The best lawyers would seem to be able to sustain a consistent voice through the presentation of bad and good news. A voice that maintains a respectful stance towards the law while also making it possible for a client to be effective in navigating its terrain. At the Law School we will continue to strive to help our students develop that consistency of voice, drawing on the vast experiential resources to be found among our 20,000 graduates.
