Engaging with Lawyers

I’ve been doing a little bit more reading into women and the law, and I came across this statement (thankfully it was over 100 years old), but it was a statement from a man in the legal industry saying that women, when they have to deal with disputes in the law, are “irrational, illogical, emotional, and erratic”. That’s how women were described.

It just demonstrates what women were thought of as the legal system developed. That’s the bias that women are dealing with, built into the system!

To a subtle degree, this viewpoint continues. When juries are selected, sometimes there will be this bias that women are highly emotional, that they’re illogical, that they’re irrational. Sometimes the bias pervades amongst the representatives, and sometimes also the judiciary. 

So in dealing with this attitude that women come to face, we need to be prepared to counter it. 

The fact is that all humans are biologically wired to have a stress response. So men, just as much as women, can have a stress response – triggering into flight, fight or freeze.

With your own stress response, you need to learn how to manage it. If you go into flight, fight, or freeze, you won’t be able to necessarily make logical decisions. 

And yes, if you are in a stress state, you tend to be more emotional. However, that’s not to say that men don’t get into the exact same position. They might just show their emotions differently, but in fact, their brains can also be non-functional in the same state.

Tips to come back down off that emotional state: 

• conscious breathing. Put your hand on your stomach, breath so your stomach relaxes and fills with your breath, and try box-breathing (4 counts in, 4 counts hold, 4 counts out, 4 counts hold). 
• understand that it can take 20 minutes to recover from a stress state. If you go into fight, flight or freeze, have a phrase pre-prepared so that you’re confident to ask for a break. Or if you are bringing a support person, make sure they know that it’s their primary role to make sure you take a break if you can stressed. Go for a walk.
• ask your brain a complex question. If you are being reactive and in a stress response, the blood has gone away from your brain and gone out to your limbs (you’re preparing to run, you’re preparing to fight). So the blood gets moved away from the brain and you’re getting pumped up with adrenaline. Asking your brain a complex question can divert some of that blood from your limbs back to your brain. 

What sort of complex questions should you ask yourself?

1. What do I want in this situation? 
2. What do I want for others? 
3. And what do I want for this relationship? 

If you ask an open-ended question, it’s surprising how the brain can refocus itself and that blood flow comes back, and your brain can actually start problem solving again.

I have many more tips and techniques like this in the “How to Negotiate for What You Want” course in the Legally Wise Women platform. Jump into the free section here.

This blog is about how the outcome for your legal problem may be affected adversely by your emotional turmoil. This is because, when we are highly emotional and stressed, we are then operating from primal instincts rather than from logic. 

There is an argument that we’re emotional beings anyway and not really driven by logic, but there are certain times when our brain is able to assess and look at information in a much more rational way than other states. Our brain is not usually functioning well when we have been triggered and angry, or when we are extremely stressed or upset. 

Now, these emotions (anger, stress, upset) are quite often what we feel when we are facing a legal problem like a separation or someone’s chasing you or your business for money, and threatening the viability of your business. And they will impact the outcome of your legal matter, because you are wanting the emotion to stop rather than focusing on a result that you want.

There’s some research that when you are triggered into a high stress response, your prefrontal cortex of your brain doesn’t function. And you revert back to using the very primal, emotional and basic part of your brain, the animal instincts. 

How do we make decisions, then, if we’re dealing with a legal problem that triggers us? 

We need to have some methods of being able to make sure our brain stays in a logical state, or we need to learn to recognise that when we are triggered we can’t make a decision, and we need to be able to calm ourselves back down.

There’s also research that it can take about 20 minutes to calm down. If you’re in a mediation, or need to respond to a proposal, doing box-breathing or going for a walk, can help calm your initial emotional reaction. 

But walking back into the exact same situation, that’s going to trigger you, can become a never-ending cycle. So what can we do? Well, you can train yourself a bit more in conflict resolution skills. You could also have someone facilitate the conversation for you. 

This is quite often why people engage a lawyer, because lawyers can then rationally argue on your behalf. But the problem is that sometimes lawyers can be far more aggressive than you want them to be. Or they assume what your interests are, and they don’t explore all the options that are available for you, and just pursue something that may not be in your best interest. So the outcome of your legal matters becomes morphed completely from what you were expecting.

What are some solutions?

Firstly, knowing what you want, and then secondly, being able to verbalise and articulate what you want – are crucial.

Finally, you can also find and hire the right person to actually represent you and your interests, and not push you in a direction you don’t want to go, or not engage in an overly aggressive form of negotiation so that it prolongs everything. 

Many women, in particular, will avoid dealing with legal problems or will completely accommodate the other party just to smooth things over and make it go away. This is quite often because we don’t want to sit in that emotion. We don’t like being in conflict. We don’t like being highly stressed. So we just want it to go away at all costs, which is not actually in your best interest long-term.

Lots of factors here … all of which we explore and teach in the Legally Wise Women platform. 

 

When you are starting to vet a shortlist of lawyers that you were considering working with, and you’re doing all your background research, this is what to look for on a lawyer’s website. 

Meet the team

Firstly, they actually need to have a lawyer’s website. There are lots of lawyers who don’t still. I personally don’t work with any professional who doesn’t have a website. I like to see the faces of the people before I go in. 

So when you find their website, have a look to see whether they’ve got all their people listed. Along with the faces, you’re also looking for what areas of law they work in, whether they’ve got accreditations, whether they’re members of certain organisations and whether they have their direct contact available (like an email or phone extension).

Contact details

Another thing that really frustrates me about any professionals website or any service provider is if they don’t have any emails listed and all you have is a web form to fill in. Really frustrating! 

What are the ways they are available for you to get in contact, and do they hide them, or do they encourage you to contact them?

Up to date

Do they blog regularly? Are they providing information to help their clients? 

That indicates a number of things. It indicates that they really want people who are more educated to work with. It also shows that they want to help people and provide as much information as they can, to make things as easy as possible for people. So it gives a little bit of an indication of the values of that firm.

If they don’t blog regularly, has the website been sitting there for 10 years without an update? It just gives you a bit of an indication of the lack of attention or time to put into these detail around their business, because ultimately the lawyer is also running the business.

Costs or fees

Do they put their fees on their lawyer website?

At least there should be some sort of statement about how they bill, if not like a menu of some fixed fee rates for certain things. If someone is not putting their fees on their website, what are they trying to hide? 

List of services

If a lawyer has a relatively small firm, you don’t want to see them with 8 plus areas of service listed on their lawyer website. You really want to see someone do a few things really well. 

So if a lawyer has way too many areas of practice, they’re not going to be really deeply skilled in a couple of areas. They may end up being more like a medical general practitioner, where they are the first point of call, but if you want something more detailed, you get a referral to a specialist. 

These are my opinions obviously, but I don’t think that there’s any excuse about having those things on a website for a solicitor.

If you need help finding the right lawyer, there is a 5-part course in the Legally Wise Women community.

Women are often scared and angry that they cannot afford to be legally represented, or even believing they cannot afford justice. Lawyers feeling like they are in charge of your issue is part of the problem – lawyers are trained to see your problem and solve it for you. The fact is: your lawyer shouldn’t be in control of your matter any way. 

Lawyers taking control is quite often why legal fees get out of control. Because the lawyer is just sort of doing what they believe needs to be done. Problem is, they make assumptions, don’t ask enough questions, and make a decision that might not be the best for you. But if you’re not controlling your matter actively, it can get out of control. 

You actually want to be in control because it is your life; your lawyer shouldn’t be in control. 

Yes, the solicitor is there to provide you with advice, but not to make your decisions for you. They should be asking you every step of the way. 

And you can say “No”, and you can ask what the other options are. 

You can also do certain aspects of the process yourself.

When you’re going through an emotionally difficult time, it’s quite a relief sometimes to basically offload and hand over the problem to someone else. But it is your life and it is your problem, so lean on the solicitor for advice and guidance and for the administrative support and professional guidance that they can give you. 

BUT, don’t just hand over the complete responsibility. Don’t just go, “Okay, well they know what they’re doing. We’ll just let them run with it.” 

It’s often in a lawyer’s interest to over-service you particularly if they’re charging you an hourly rate, and do more than what you actually need. 

Even though it’s stressful and tricky and difficult to have to face something like a personal legal problem, it is your problem. A bit of tough love: the outcome depends on how you manage the process.

So learn how to find a solicitor that is right for you, instead of someone that can’t work with you.

For those legally wise women who have engaged a solicitor to help them, this is about how to keep track of your own records for your legal matter.

Part of being legally wise is taking responsibility for your own legal matter. 

You can’t just hand off responsibility to a professional. There are certain things that a professional will do for you, but their primary role is to advise. 

It’s your life, it’s your matter, so you have to keep responsibility of it.

Now that being said, there’s going to be a whole lot of things that your lawyer is doing for you. You need to keep track of what correspondence goes backwards and forwards, what advice you’re given, what offers are made and any court legal documents. 

Most solicitors will email everything to you, so you should have a complete record of pretty much everything they’re doing. I would suggest either having a special folder in your email browser on your laptop or PC where you move everything to that is emailed to you about your legal matter.

If you’re happy to use purely electronic records, then I suggest you also have a separate folder on your desktop which becomes the folder for your legal matter. Inside that folder, I suggest sub-folders. 

So sub-folders should be:

• correspondence, 
• offers, and
• legal documents. 

You may want to keep your own notes as well. So if you type up some notes about what advice you’re given during conversations, you’d put them into another ‘notes’ sub-folder. 

Then each piece of correspondence that comes in either from your solicitor or from the other party’s solicitor goes into the correspondence folder.

Try and keep it sequential in terms of date, so you can work out if you have to go back, the sequence of what happened when. 

Keep another folder with all the legal documents. So you may have multiple drafts before you end up signing a legal document. Realistically the ones you want to keep are the ones that have a court seal on them. So after you’ve signed documents, your solicitor files those, they should then give you sealed copies, which are the ones the court has. When the other party sends legal documents, they serve you with those, they should also have a court seal. So again, keep those all together so you’ve got one central place for all your legal documents.

The reason why I like to keep offers separate from general correspondence is because you want to come back to them and double-check what offers have been made when, and what are still current, what offer do we need to tweak or change, and what offer can we rely on in a cost matter, for example.

So, you don’t have to understand everything that I’ve been talking about in terms of cost, service, filing, all those things, but just understand to take responsibility for your matter. As a woman who is legally wise, you are responsible for what happens in your life. The solicitor is assisting, guiding, advising, but ultimately make sure you take control and keep records for yourself too.

Before going into some kind of negotiation or dispute settlement, whether you’re doing it yourself or whether you’ve got a lawyer representing you, it would be really interesting for you to learn what your natural conflict style is. 

So there’s been a couple of little tools put out there where you can do a quiz or a questionnaire to find out your natural conflict style. 

Quite often it’s put on an X-Y axis where the X axis is how assertive you are, and the Y axis is how much you value a relationship. 

We want to be sort of in the middle of that scenario, or as far out to being assertive and valuing the other person as possible, because we want both. We want to retain the relationship if possible, or some kind of working relationship, but we also want to assert what our rights are.

So, if, for example, if you’re not assertive and you don’t care about the relationship, then you’re going to have an avoidant conflict style, and you’re pretty much going to go, “Well, I don’t really care.” You’ll walk away; you’re not going to fight for your own rights, and you’re not going to care about the other person either. 

If you care deeply about the relationship, but you don’t value your own needs very much, you’re going to have a more accommodating style. So you’re going to pretty much let them get what they want just for the sake of keeping the relationship. 

So the avoidant and accommodating styles are typically the conflict styles, that women take, primarily because we are conditioned to keep other people happy when we’re raised as children.

However, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn to be otherwise, or to consciously develop some skills to bring us into a more collaborative style. A compromising or collaborative conflict style means that we equally value and assert what we want, but also value the other person.

So, conflict styles are really interesting, and knowing yours can help you learn the skills to get more of what you want. 

I do a lot more training on this in my course about learning how to negotiate to get what you want, which is in my Legally Wise Women community.