The newly-launched "Your Lawyer Story" website is a new initiative of Otago’s Legal Issues Centre.
Initially, people’s accounts of their dealings with the legal profession — good and bad — will be used to formulate the course material for a Summer School paper on legal practice.
Long-term, as well as assisting in training the lawyers of the future, the information will aid the Legal Issues Centre’s work studying accessibility and fairness in the justice system.
"I really want students to engage with a client’s perspective when thinking about how legal services could look in the future or should look in the future," Legal Issues Centre director Bridgette Toy-Cronin said.
"What is it that the legal profession is offering now, and what is that people actually want? What sort of legal services should we be providing? I wanted to generate real people’s experiences with lawyers to show the students this is what people liked, this is what people didn’t like."
All submissions are moderated and identifying details removed, but anonymisation did not neutralise the effectiveness of the stories as teaching tools, Dr Toy-Cronin said.
For example, the first example offered on the site — about a family break-up — was a useful example of the need for lawyers to have empathy with their clients, and the need to sometimes be as much a counsellor as an advocate.
"Lawyers aren’t taught to be counsellors, but that is often what clients want, someone to give them sage, wise advice," Dr Toy-Cronin said.
"While lawyers talk a lot about a client’s perspective, they are also coming from a specific starting point, because the way we talk about clients at law school is as the plaintiff or the defendant; everyone is abstracted.
"What that means is that when we actually come face to face with a client, we don’t always know what it is that they need."
Other stories submitted so far include an employment law issue where the client faced a bill they thought was too high, the difficulty of finding a lawyer for a Resource Management case, and issues dealing with conflicts of interest.
"We hope the work will be a resource for the profession and for people training the profession, to think more deeply about what the client experience is," Dr Toy-Cronin said.
To submit your story visit http://www.yourlawyerstory.org.nz/
- Mike Houlahan
Comments
Good concept, but in adversarial law, the parties have lawyers in their 'corners'. Usually, emotion is secondary to the clarity of legal process. Lawyers do facilitate any client need to talk of personal aspects which may not be relevant to legal judgment, bearing in mind that time is money.
*I have no association with legal systems, but with Sociology.