Second Edition of Connecting With Your Client Now Available Through ABA & Amazon

The just released second edition of Connecting With Your Client (2015, ABA Publishing) gives attorneys the most up-to-date communication and persuasive tools needed to achieve greater client satisfaction. The author, leading psychologist and legal consultant Noelle C. Nelson, Ph.D., presents practical guidance and specific examples based on sound psychological principles and more than 25 years of experience in the legal field.

“Attorneys everywhere are being forced to reconsider their definition of service and how they approach client satisfaction,” says Nelson. “It’s more than just providing excellent lawyering. Clients expect that. Attorneys must consider how legal expertise is actually conveyed to the client. That means everything from promptly delivered phone calls and emails, to the best methods to keep the client appropriately informed and prepared, to a legal professional's attitude toward the client.”

The book contains updated information on:

• Effectively communicating using the latest technology
• Creating rapport that builds your client's trust and confidence
• Communicating billing and other case management issues in ways that support good client-lawyer relations
• Training your associates, legal assistants and support staff to adopt the appropriate attitude toward clients
• Step-by-step exercises that can help defuse uncomfortable situations

“When a client is frustrated, anxious or angry, communication between client and attorney often breaks down, which can negatively impact a case,” says Nelson. Connecting With Your Client provides step-by-step exercises to help attorneys stay in charge and to ensure that the client is satisfied with the legal services received.

The book also includes professional solutions drawn from real-life, real-case experiences. Managing partners, executive directors and marketing directors of top-level firms contribute their perspective and share their solutions for attaining client satisfaction and cooperation.

Connecting With Your Client is available at Shop ABA, Amazon or call by 800-285-2221. It is available in print and as an e-book.

Is Cross-Examination a Viable Opportunity for Your Expert to Educate? Yes!

Most good experts know that their role is one of educating the jurors to their point of view, to their opinion. This is true whether the expert is responding to direct or cross examination.

Experts are usually adept at looking at counsel during a question posed in direct examination, then spontaneously looking at the jurors for the greater part of their response. They are indeed fulfilling their role as educators.

However, when it comes to cross, too many experts become locked in an eye-to-eye duel with opposing counsel, mightily defending their opinion. They stop educating. One of the easiest ways to counter this tendency is to encourage your experts to maintain good eye contact with the jurors even during cross. Not, of course, as the question is being asked, but during the expert’s response, as long as that response is more than just a few words.

It is certainly more challenging, but a well-prepared expert can usually find a way to restate his/her opinion, and during that portion of their response, look out to the jurors. Just as the expert will or did during direct.

Practice with your expert! Role-play a few cross examination questions to support your expert’s ability to continue his/her educating-the-jurors function even as the expert is in a more defensive posture.

Eye contact can make all the difference.

Answer a Primordial Question for the Jurors: Who?

The names, acronyms and abbreviations so familiar to you, are not to the jurors. You may think that by saying, for example, “Acme Building Supply, which we’ll now call ABS for convenience” is enough to warrant saying “ABS” through the rest of your trial.

But “ABS” has no guts to it, has no uniqueness, no personality, as it were. As laborious as it may be for you to repeat the full appelation, “Acme Building Supply” has a history. It’s associated with events, persons--it has a life. “ABS” is just another bit of alphabet soup.

Be sure to use full names of persons, entities or objects throughout your trial. Avoid the use of pronouns or abbreviated references. Jurors often have trouble keeping track of who did what to whom. They will be totally lost if they must also concentrate on which "he," "she," or "it" you are now referring to. Certainly, well-known abbreviations are acceptable, but generally speaking, abbreviations used too often only serve to confuse jurors. A confused juror is an unsympathetic juror. An unsympathetic juror is the one who could cause you to lose your case.