Through trauma-informed procedures, courts can enhance the victim’s belief in procedural justice, decreasing the potentially negative experiences they may have in court, regardless of the outcome of the case. If the courts are to be effective in their delivery of fairness and justice, they need to be aware of the underlying trauma of many ...
TRAUMA-RESPONSIVE PRACTICES ATTORNEYS Prior to meeting with your clients, review the case file and circle trauma events/adverse childhood experiences. Take time at the beginning of the case to establish rapport with your clients. Determine if there are other open or closed family court cases involving the family. File a notice of related cases
Aug 10, 2020 · The initial challenge when working with traumatized clients is to “listen more and talk a lot less.” Listening to a traumatized client is perhaps the most important thing you can do to help them. You cannot listen with your cell phone on the table, so put your phone away. Pick a meeting location in your office that is conducive to listening.
Back pain, migraines, arthritis, even acne often clear up. Then, when recovery from trauma is complete, the physical symptoms return. When the system starts …
What you see and what you hear are critical if your goal is to recognize and address trauma caused by family conflict. However, these guidelines apply to most practice areas.
When it comes to traumatized clients, my greatest measure of success is what my client says to me when I’m done listening.
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If the case is lost, the client suffers the consequences.
In all this, we must remember that a lawyer’s first obligation is to the client; our professional license and the rules of professional responsibility require it. To successfully meet this obligation, lawyers need to maintain mental and emotional health.
The key to protecting yourself emotionally is to be empathetic, reassuring the client that you are competent and confident, yet remaining detached by focusing on the facts and staying calm. You are helping your client have the best chance at winning the case.
2. Don’t ignore the problem. If you have a case that is triggering a strong emotional reaction, don’t try to tough it out. Keeping it bottled up is harmful.
If your job is overwhelming you emotionally, to the point where you can’t function in a healthy way, you need to seek help. Talking to a therapist or a counselor can help put things in perspective and provide tangible actions to address the trauma.
After all, a strong attorney-client relationship requires some level of empathy, where the client feels heard and understood. Without empathy, it’s hard to build a trusted relationship.
Even if you catch the client lying, confrontation requires some discretion. If you react too callously, the client may fear you and might not feel comfortable disclosing information. Also, people in general don’t want to lose face. This is truer in some cultures than others. Clients may end up being difficult and hostile and, in some cases, you may end up losing the client.
How to do this might depend on the client’s personality. Some clients should be told straight out that they need to be upfront with you about everything. For others, you need to assure them that you take the attorney-client privilege seriously. For clients who are sensitive about money, you may want to tell them a story about how a lie forced you to spend additional hours cleaning up the mess and how the client was billed accordingly. The best way to deal with a lying client is to give them every incentive not to.
Sometimes, they do it to gain more sympathy or make their case sound more favorable than it really is. Or they do it to trick you into lowering your fee. Or they don’t want you to get angry at them. For some people, lying is so integral to their manipulative personalities that they don’t even know they are doing it.
You might be tempted to call out you client on the lie, hoping that he will stop doing it moving forward. But you can end up having a very awkward, distrustful relationship or lose the client altogether.
As lawyers, we occasionally run into people who have trouble being truthful. Sometimes, you find a way to deal with their alternative facts. For others, their constant web of deceit makes it impossible for you to do your job.
Obviously, working with a lying client will make your work more difficult. You have to verify everything the client says, which can take up time. And you will view your client with a degree of skepticism.
1. Material Misrepresentations to a Client Which Breach a Duty, Causing Damages. The standard test for legal negligence applies to a lie a lawyer tells a client. Since the relationship between attorney and client is fiduciary in nature, attorneys are held to a fiduciary standard when it comes to misrepresentations made to a client.
Negligent Misrepresentations in Negotiations. If a lawyer makes an intentional or negligent misrepresentation of a material fact during negotiations, with the intent that the people who hearing the lie will depend upon it, the attorney may be held liable to the people to whom the misrepresentation was made. However, this applies only to statements the lawyer makes (a) without a reasonable basis for believing the statements are true, and (b) with the intent that the hearer will act or rely upon them.
Attorneys may not commit fraud or promissory fraud in the course of representing clients. (Promissory Fraud means a promise made to induce a person’s reliance or action, which the person making the promise has no intent to actually perform.)
Ironically, Shakespeare’s famous line was not a call to violence against corruption; in fact, it was said by a man who hoped to overthrow justice by removing the people who ensured it would be done: the (non-corrupt) lawyers. However, lawyers–like other people–do sometimes lie. The question is.
A lawyer may not knowingly make a false mis representation of facts to a non-client with the intent to induce reliance on the lie, under circumstances where a reasonable person would rely on the false statement. 3. Negligent Misrepresentations in Negotiations.
As a general rule, attorneys should not knowingly lie or conceal material facts from a client.
However, lawyers may engage in “puffing,” and make statements regarding the client’s negotiating goals or willingness to compromise, and these statements are not generally considered “false statements of material fact” which create malpractice or negligence liability for the lawyer.