Content Forecast: This section contains references to sexual assault and suicide. All vivid descriptions have been removed.

There are many challenging times in a student’s early law practice, but one that students consistently struggle with are client disclosures of sexual assault, self-harm, suicidal ideation, or other traumatic life events. This section will be most useful to students in a direct service context – meaning, students who working directly with clients. Other legal contexts (eg. appellate advocacy) also deal with traumatic material; however, this section directly address the moments when clients disclose traumatic events to their lawyer. Successfully reaching a point where a trusting lawyer-client relationship exists and difficult questions can be explored requires good disclosure skill. As is hopefully clear, “disclosure” here means the act of a client telling their narrative rather than the documents received from the other side in a legal matter.

In some cases, students will already know that the client has experienced one or more of these events. The legal matter might be focused around, for example, sexual assault. However, it is also possible that a client discloses these events for the first time to their lawyer. The lawyer’s reaction to a client’s disclosure is one of the most important points in the lawyer-client relationship for several reasons.

The first is negativity bias. Negativity bias is a well-researched human phenomenon. In essence, people “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information” (Vaish et al., 2008). Haskell and Hanson wrote that “two thirds of neurons in the amygdala are geared toward bad news, immediately responding and storing it in our long-term memory” (Haskell and Hanson, 2009). Consider how you might remember receiving a single negative piece of feedback despite much more positive feedback on an assignment. Consider how you might remember one ‘bad’ grade on a transcript more than the many ‘good’ grades you received. In short, negative events shape our lives more vividly than positive events.

In a legal context, this means that if a lawyer responds negatively to disclosure, especially if it is the first time a client discusses an event, this has potentially devastating effects. It decreases the chance of disclosure in the future. It also shuts down an open lawyer-client relationship, and decreases the chances feelings of client safety to disclose in a potential trial context. In sum, how a lawyer reacts is important both for the client’s wellbeing and the success of their legal matter.

Some tips to prepare a client who might provide painful information are as follows.

1. Provide context. If you need to ask intrusive questions explain why you are asking them acknowledge how hard it is to give the information.
2. Manage Expectations. Explain what will be done with the information with the information you gather, and discuss what can the client can expect from the process.
3. Discuss potentially negative consequences. These should be shared in advance, though not necessarily in the first interview. You legitimately might not be able to control how disclosure is used, so being honest and preparing for potentially negative consequences is very important.
4. Use language that is accessible for these conversations – legalese is unhelpful!
5. Be patient and validating, not judgmental. Clients might not identify a certain behaviour as abusive, despite your own alarm bells going off. Consider – what is the meaning of the behaviour to them? What makes a threat “credible”?
6. If the client leaves suddenly, acknowledge their feelings rather than blame them. Say something like “I can see this is hard for you”, then plan for next steps (a future meeting, for example).