To be effective, the attorney-client relationship needs to be more than the attorney providing legal advice and counsel to his or her client. Veteran attorney Arezou Kohan asserts lawyers should try to understand their clients' values and aspirations and use coaching skills to help clients achieve their goals.
"Coaching Your Client: A Lawyer's Guide for Improving Client Communication and Client Outcomes," a new book from the American Bar Association, is a user-friendly guide that provides practical and noncumbersome coaching skills that can be incorporated into a legal practice immediately.
Rather than trying to impose a preferred solution on their client, lawyers should better listen to their clients, educate their clients on their options and engage the client in solutions, Kohan suggests. The results of this approach, she adds, would be happier clients and a more productive attorney-client relationship.
Kohan devotes specific chapters to the principles of coaching and the history of coaching and the law, as well as how to design an "attorney-client alliance." She emphasizes that lawyers must work toward their own fulfillment in order to help clients achieve their fulfillment. The book serves as the quintessential relationship skills resource for attorneys. Using this "attorney-client alliance" model, Kohan shows lawyers how to empower their clients and engage them in solutions.
Kohan, a Beverly Hills, Calif., based mediator and life coach, is a former civil litigator in private practice for more than a decade, She earned her J.D. from Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, received her mediation training from the Straus Institute of Conflict Resolution at Pepperdine University School of Law and her life-coaching training from the Coaches Training Institute.
Published: Tue, May 12, 2015
