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Crisis Intervention by Lawyers and Legal Assistants
by T.W. Arnold
For many people the experience of divorce is one of the most difficult and traumatic crises that they will ever encounter. With 50% of first marriages and 65% of second marriages in this country ending in divorce, it is also one of the most common. Feelings of fear, helplessness, confusion, inadequacy, anxiety, hurt, and exhaustion are normal. The failure to skillfully manage these feelings and to apply a solutions focused approach to resolving legal disputes can seriously impede a person's wellbeing and present and future functioning within their families, at work, and in social relationships. The stress of relationship break up can destroy one's health and make one feel almost insane at times.
Emotional difficulties emerge around all kinds of legal issues including relationship and family break up, and estate planning. Lawyers are front line responders to crisis, but most of them don't understand their roles. Many attorneys have no interest in dealing with their client's emotions. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger famously criticized lawyer's lack of technical experience with crisis, which has to some small extent changed law school training formats so that some schools teach therapeutic skills as well as legal skills. Yet, lawyers remain widely ignorant and disinterested in their holistic interventions to help their clients.
Attorneys and staff have frequent contact with individuals in crisis in family law settings. By recognizing and defusing intense feelings, points of view, and situations, they can help clients clarify priorities, link to other helping resources, and both lawyers and clients can become more efficient and goal oriented.
In considering the role of attorneys, scholars and counselors have suggested that it properly includes empathy and guidance, resembling what crisis workers call "psychological first aid." A three step process has been designed to help attorneys facilitate disclosure of relevant information in order to formulate a strategy for providing help:
- Encouraging the client to express concerns and emotional reactions (this assists the client in describing the situation).
- Thorough empathetic listening enables attorneys to help clients acknowledge emotions.
- After this, the attorney may begin to develop and verify problem solving theories based upon what has been learned.
It is essential that attorneys help the client evaluate alternatives in dealing with the problem, and in order to accomplish this attorneys need to actively listen and respond to these feelings rather than focusing merely upon the facts. The attorney's role is to establish rapport (support must be developed and feelings explored before any real progress can be made). In order to handle cases efficiently, attorneys need to understand the motives, personality structure, and unconscious thoughts in order to 'expose' the unconscious material from the what appears to be a confused client.
From a lawyer's point of view, it is both practical and efficient in the long run to deal directly with the emotions which a client brings. The time saved sticking to the legal objective and objective legal facts is likely to be lost if the client confuses facts with feelings.
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