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i realized when i was in a private corporate law firm in washington d_c_ that
uh... some of the people who were senior partners and hugely successful in the profession were
not people that i admired or wanted to be like
and what i identified was there
the shortcomings of their career
that were in part the way they had to be to be so successful in their career made them much
less successful in other parts of their lives
first it took too much time to be that successful a lawyer but also their qualities of
empathy and kindness and the capacity to listen
and the capacity to
uh...
to be respectful of other people's uh... demands
those people lacked a lot of those skills
some of these skills have come to be called emotional intelligence yes yes
and i believe that emotional intelligence is an extremely important quality for a lawyer
a lawyer who meets a new client a potential client for the first time has to be able to
present
herself or himself in a way
that lets the client know that this is someone
that the client can trust
just saying trust me doesn't do the job it's got to be somebody who by his presence shows
the person he's speaking to that he really is accessible and available
and is an effective listener
the skills of listening which are so important for lawyers
are not normally cultivated in legal education
and what's true of lawyers is true of many professions
uh... there are statistics that show how
frequently
doctors interrupt their patients when the patients are trying to describe what their
conditions are
and that capacity to listen is something which is undervalued in in many educational
systems and in systems of professional training
yeah there's a lot being written these days about doctors
uh... not that listening to their patients and therefore
uh... uh... missing a great deal Jerome Groopman's book is uh... is in part major part
about that kind of a thing