Making Law a 'people's thing'

A few unconnected events and pieces of reading that I have done this week have gotten me thinking about skills that good solicitors have or require.

I was reading a short interview of one Magic Circle firm partner who was talking about the need for good solicitors to understand human nature. Law he says, is about regulating the relationship between individual people. So I guess, his thinking is, that if you are advising one party, you should be aware of their needs; what they are looking for and perhaps even, why they are pursuing a particular something. I then began thinking about how well I understand people and about my ability to form strong relationships with people. Yesterday, I then read Sathnam Sanghera’s article in the Times on charisma. He talks about what it is, why people need it and how it helps them. Sanghera argues that there are people who are so fantastically good at engaging other people’s attention that they are able to do it through their facial expressions alone - not from what they say or even from what they do - but from their expressions alone. People that aren’t able to do this well, suffer as a result Sanghera argues; especially if they occupy positions that require them to have charisma. So, I ask myself, do solicitors require charisma? The compromise position that I seem to have come too is some do some don’t . Perhaps it varies with what kind of law you are practising or what sort of clients you have but ultimately, I think it comes down to whether you, yourself really want it. I do. I’d like to think that I am good at understanding people that I can engage them into understanding my views and I think I can sound and be interesting whilst doing so.

So how have I been able to do this. Well for one, I have a good memory of conversations that I have had with people in the past. I’m good at making links between different facts that I know about people and as a result I think I understand them better. I’m able to make them feel at home when they talk to me and even, get them to tell me things that they perhaps wouldn’t tell other people - not even their closest friends. Its not only that, I enjoy painting a picture about them with every little detail I learn about them in the future. I don’t know how I am able to do this - it just seems to happen. I don’t even particularly need to know a person well at all. I could overhear snippets of a conversation at University and I seem to file it away. Later, when I talk to the particular person, I tailor my conversation towards them and things that interest them and voila! - they want to tell me something I don’t already know and I learn more. Honestly, I wish I had the same approach to the Law, it would come in really useful for learning all those important concepts and facts.

I think I’m honest and open about offering advice to. When I get asked about something, something I perhaps know absolutely nothing about, I try to find out the answer as best as possible using more energy than is expected of me. I don’t like to say: ‘I don’t know’. I think some people even try to hide the fact that they know the answer to a question by denying they know anything about it at all: ‘Why should I depart with my hard learned information when I’m not going to get something in return?’. It happens at Law schools, I’m sure of it. You may have read some fantastically-written-easy-to-understand article on a particularly difficult area of the Law and when a student asks you how come you know the area so well, you instead tell them: ‘ Through grinding my way through the lecture notes and textbook again and again’. I don’ use this approach. I’m very willing to offer advice to other people. I want everyone to be at their best and yes, I want to be better than them.

This brings me to something else I am very good at doing: working in a team. I think I’m good at bringing out the best in people. I think I can help them to help themselves: help them to use skills/ideas they have never been able to use before they worked with me. How do I do this? Well, importantly, I think I’m able to make them feel valued so much so that they feel compelled to think more and work harder. I think its because they want to be more like…well….me. They want to share my confidence, they feel warm in it. They want to be in a position where, in the future, they too will be able to bring out the best in people. It’s a learning process. I think its another important skills for solicitors to have and I think they learn it through observation of their peers and elders.

I found all this thinking to be very important with respect to the Law especially because of the lay person’s perception of it. They don’t think of Judges, solicitors, barristers as being warm people - not at all. They think we are posh, upper-class and were born with a silver spoon in our mouths. To an extent, I think they are right. They have a somewhat faulty perception and they usually use terrible language to describe us, but they are, otherwise, bang on. Solicitors should be good communicators. They should be able to describe complex information in an easy-to-understand way and they shouldn’t use ‘advanced’ language or sentence construction where nice easy terminology would achieve the same result. Of course, the way our Laws our structured in Acts of Parliament and the way our Judges interpret it are written in complex ways and I don’t deny that they should be. Mostly, they are on complex issues and so to accordingly, the language should be tougher. When us Lawyers communicate amongst ourselves, that’s fine. The problem arises when we communicate with the lay-person, the very people that our Laws are aimed at. We were the people that created our complex system of Law and we did it in a way in which only we could understand it. As Lawyers, I think we forget that just because we don’t have our own PR crew like politicians do, we don’t need to think about our perception. I think this is wrong. I think it’s a high-risk course of action to take to believe that we are in demand and that people do need to come to us to know the law and therefore we will never be out of business. Instead, like all good businesses we should strive to be more responsive to people’s needs.

Law is for the everyone and we should, as lawyers, make it so - its our duty. George Orwell’s essays on the English language are particularly instructive in this area and I would advise all lawyers to embrace his suggestions. Although language isn’t the only barrier preventing the law from being more accessible, its an important one and if corrected, it will also improve our image as lawyers.