Clients Gain New Stature in Law School

There is one thing law students don’t learn much about in law school: clients.

Learning about clients is a relatively new field in legal education. Lawyers can’t really exist without clients, so it seems only natural that law schools would spend considerable time teaching students how to deal with clients. But that’s not the case.

Law schools traditionally concentrate on how to identify and analyze legal issues, develop arguments from legal principles, research cases and statutes, make oral presentations to judges and examine the underlying public policy of rulings.

Law school textbooks, called case books, are compilations of published rulings from courts across the country. They do not address how people feel, how someone might select a lawyer, how much a case is worth to a client or what happens to a client after a case is won, lost or settled.

Fortunately, things are changing. Now, client counseling is taught as a separate subject in many law schools. Students learn to counsel clients, to try to understand clients, to be alert to their concerns. One result of this trend is an international competition in client counseling, held last month at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.

Forrest Mosten, a Los Angeles lawyer, has done much of the work in arranging the annual program. This year, students came from Canada, England, Scotland and Australia as well as from across the United States.

In the competition, a fictional client, often someone trained as an actor, is given a confidential profile describing a client. The client-actor then holds a series of sessions with different student lawyers. Judges watch and listen to determine which students are the most effective.

Legal educators have grown to understand how important it is that lawyers work well with, and understand the needs of, clients and potential clients. There are now more than half a dozen textbooks in this field, and numerous articles are being published in professional journals.

A recent law review article by Prof. Linda Morton has a title that suggests the range of possibilities: “Finding a Suitable Lawyer: Why Consumers Can’t Always Get What They Want and What the Legal Profession Should Do About It.”

It’s a two-way street. Lawyers need to develop sensitivity to their clients’ interests. But consumers of legal services can play a valuable role by insisting on effective, straight-forward counseling and clear communication.