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The law school’s senior staff meet monthly and we occasionally convert the meeting into a group training. Things as common as managing personality types or corporate finance nuances. Perhaps the most unusual at my current workplace was one on improvisational communication. It went about the way you would think but it has led me to think a lot more closely about what we teach law students as well as re-inforcing my own perspectives of lawyer communication.

I am not a devotee of improv. I particularly did not enjoy this participatory event but you sometimes do things anyway. It has less to do with improv than I have never been a fan for activities that require role play (and where opting out is offered but not really culturally supported). Over my career, as I have realized my personal aversion to these, I’m more aware that I’m probably not the only one who would prefer (or perhaps should) not engage in these activities.

People talk about pushing oneself out of a comfort zone. I embrace that too, when we are talking about effort but not when we are talking about learning. For example, if I’m exhausted climbing a hill, I may need to push myself to continue up, even beyond what I’m comfortable with. It is a completely different thing to try to develop a skill or learn something when the environment in which it is being experienced is toxic or so uncomfortable that you spend part of your cognitive space managing the context.

At the same time, I appreciate what the goal is and I have enjoyed when I see other people using it effectively. For example, I watch an actual play role-playing group known as Critical Role. Their games, usually Dungeons and Dragons or similar game sets, are great examples of people using improvisational techniques. The collaborative communication is really interesting to watch as well as seeing people adapt to what someone has also started to create, which may not have been the direction the individual had intended for themselves.

The Opposite of Collaborative Communication

The professor who gave our improv session—and who clearly loves improv and wants to share and engender that love in others—did a great job. I participated in all of the activities but am at a point in my career where I often observe the activity even while participating. It was funny to me to hear people attempting to correct, or suggest that someone else’s approach was somehow incorrect, in an improv activity. Fundamentally, not everyone is open to this sort of communication. It’s not just that it can be uncomfortable; it may be antagonizing.

After the session was over, I sent the professor a long email in response to their question about how improv might be used in a law school. In other words, was there a way for them to pitch workshops or other activities for law students. I suggested that there were possibilities but that it would be important to understand how law students and lawyers are taught to communicate. Frankly, it is not a collaborative method. It is adversarial.

This was one of those moments where I learned more about my own thoughts as I tried to express them to someone else. I do not believe that law school prepares lawyers to communicate effectively verbally. Most students will be taught how to communicate effectively for adversarial situations—trial advocacy, moot court—and perhaps even for collaborative environments, like alternative dispute resolution. In some cases, they will get experience communicating with clients or people outside of a hierarchy (judges, supervising lawyers) or regulatory framework (opposing counsel, unrepresented parties).

It is why I think that having lawyers as spokespeople for situations outside of an adjudicative setting is so preposterous. Law students are not taught how to communicate in an interview situation. It is not enough to know how to respond quickly “on your feet” and the risk aversion that is built into lawyer communication becomes a flaw in other environments. Lawyers can learn other methods of communication—so some lawyers may eventually be effective in media-facing roles—but I don’t think it is by any means the norm.

We ended up discussing my description of lawyer communication often being more like leading someone through a maze to a goal, rather than a shared development of a path. As an example, I discussed the American Jurisprudence Proof of Facts resource. For any non-law librarians reading this, Am. Jur. Proof of Facts is a secondary publication that is replete with hypotheticals and supporting question-and-answer scripts on how to prove any given fact. They are shortcuts for people engaging in litigation who need to prove certain things to overcome element or other requirements in a fact-based adversarial situation. No one wants their case thrown out for failing to prove a key element and practice resources like this can help that.

But a Proof of Facts Q&A is a railroad and much of lawyer communication is also fixed to a specific path. It is not meant to be an exploration. As the rule goes, never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. That’s not entirely true, since you can only woodshed your own folks and a deposition or interrogatory may not elicit all the information you need. In general, though, someone engaging in examination, direct or cross, is going to want to avoid creative answers that go beyond what needs to be addressed in the courtroom. Communication in a courtroom is not meant to have the same tempo or purpose, a purpose that may be known when the communication starts, as it is outside the courtroom.

Where Improv Might Help Lawyers

It is perhaps obvious that I think lawyers are poor communicators. That perspective means that, ironically perhaps, I think improv might have a lot of usefulness in a law faculty. It would just need to be tailored in a way that may not be obvious to someone from an improv background.

For one thing, if other people share my perspective, improv has a comedy foundation and can be geared towards the zany rather than the practical. I think this context can make it harder to sell as a tool in a law school curriculum. Student groups might embrace that, for the same reasons our senior staff team did, as a team building exercise more than as a communication skills development.

If I were to pitch improv as a communications tool for law students, it would be in these ways:

  • reaction efficacy. Law students have to learn how to deal with questions that may stump them. Improv builds a muscle memory for how to take on unexpected information and redirect it to something else. I don’t mean redirect in the sense of deflect. Rather, if a judge asks a question and you aren’t immediately sure how you want to answer, you may need a tool set to manage that moment. One element the professor and I discussed was learning to be silent for a second or two. The natural reaction to want to immediately start talking when the other party stops can be unlearned. If a law student learns to take a beat, and to learn to live with the discomfort initially of waiting a second or even two or three before responding, they can improve their overall communication skills. That’s something that can work in both adversarial and collaborative communication environments.
  • non-adversarial communications. Law schools over-weight skills training towards litigation even though many law school graduates will not enter a courtroom or will have seen those skills deteriorate by the time they do. Where schools have an ADR or third-party negotiation program, an improv component might be really helpful. If you are trying to reach an agreement between two other parties, you may need to be able to absorb suggestions and refashion them—given knowledge that only you may hold—to direct them towards that shared endpoint. Unlike in litigation, where a lawyer has already documented the outcome (relief stated in a complaint, for example), other forms of dispute resolution may not have a fixed goal. If people walk away feeling as though they have “won” or received “justice”, then having a flexible communication style that helps them get there is an asset.
  • communications outside outcomes. This is everything else. A style of communicating when you are sitting on a governance board and working with staff to help think about strategy and the future. Or when you are talking with other people, that may or may not include lawyers, who are working towards a collaborative goal: a volunteer group or a CE panel or whatever. It would be an advantage to have communication tool that encourages you, and others, to accept every suggestion and try to build on it.

These are obviously options that would appeal to a person like me, who was not ever going to be in a courtroom and who dislikes adversarial situations. The value of teaching law students more collaborative ways of communicating would have other, less obvious benefits. For example, another belief I have is that most people who go to law school do not know how to manage other people. This can range from law library directors to law firm managing partners to judges. If they have the skills to communicate well with their staff or colleagues, it is often because they learned those skills outside law school or their workplace. Law students coming out with a more collaborative communication toolset may be more adaptable as future leaders.

In the end, I had a good conversation with the professor. I am hopeful he will attempt to make a pitch and will be interested to see how the law faculty and students respond. But I’ll watch from the sidelines. I think my improv time is done.