Address by President McAleese Client Counselling Association Dinner Stormont
Address by President McAleese Client Counselling Association Dinner Stormont Saturday, 8 April 2000
Ladies and gentlemen,
This historic building has many stories to tell, some good, some bad, some full of hope, some heavy with disappointment. But as host to the Louis M Brown International Client Counselling Competition, it has added to its store of good days, days of pride and days of hope. That this gathering of young lawyers from all over the world under the auspices of such a distinguished competition should take place here in Belfast, is thanks to the commitment, vision and hard work of the Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies, and my former colleague, Anne Fenton. I want to congratulate Anne and the Institute, together with Jennifer Shevlin and the Law Society of Northern Ireland, for what has been a huge undertaking but, crucially, an enormously successful one.
Law students are the victims of many shocks and rude awakenings in their lives from day one in Law School- the astounding length of subject reading lists, the disappearance from the library of all the books on the reading list the minute you need them, the inevitable theft from the library of all material on delinquency recommended on the Criminology course, the unreasonable length of judicial pronouncements on what constitutes reasonable conduct, the realisation as you stand in court on your first day that you haven’t a clue where to sit and then the dawning of the truth, the biggest shock of all, as you finally have revealed to you what all this endeavour has after all been about: personal fulfilment? Yes, partly; wealth and fame? God Bless your innocence. No, what it is all about is the man or woman, boy or girl who, out of all the lawyers in all the world, chose you or had you thrust upon them.
A lawyer without a client is only marginally more stressed out than a lawyer with a client. Many a lawyer has stories about clients from hell and many a client has stories about lawyers from somewhere other than heaven - since it seems lawyers are detested equally by both saints and sinners we must presume God has made special arrangements for us! Whatthis competition does and what all good professional legal training courses do, is to give student lawyers the wisdom and insight of that realisation that the client is a lawyer’s centre of gravity, long before the real client and his or her real problems are sitting trembling in front of you, either in hope that you will do a good job for them or rage that you have just messed it up.
Somewhere along the line as we study law we come to see ourselves as receptacles into which huge amounts of information are poured for processing and communication back to the teacher who told us it all in the first place. That is, of course, part of the necessary tyranny of exams, but the communication skills which work for tutorials or essays are very different from the communication skills needed to communicate effectively with the huge and often random range of clients you will meet in practice. And among those clients, even among those most satisfied with the outcome his or her lawyer managed to achieve, there is always the potential for "communication failure", for sending a client away thoroughly dissatisfied with the experience of the process of being a client. The client who is pleased with your work will hopefully tell a handful of people how good you are. The client who is displeased, will as sure as eggs are eggs, tell as many people as humanly possible how bad he thinks you are. For any lawyer who wants to do a sound and rounded professional job, who wants to get both process and outcome as right as possible, it is essential to comprehend the complexities and intricacies of interpersonal communication and the price we pay when it breaks down.
The recognition and appreciation of the client not as a legal problem but as a person with a legal problem lies at the heart of client counselling. Involvement in this competition has encouraged participants to focus on the importance of establishing a good working relationship with clients, appreciating their needs and expectations, working out the kind of skills needed to deal with not just their problems but their personalities and their views. From the first meeting and greeting, the building blocks of a trusting and fluent relationship are either set in place well or badly. The lawyer needs to know both this person and his or her problem well, as well as the client knows it and even better. That takes good listening skills, intuitive and intelligent information gathering skills, an ability to harness the loquacious, meandering client without embarrassment and an ability to draw out the monosyllabic client without undue delay.
The good lawyer knows the law does not have all the answers. Sometimes the good lawyer see a role for mediation, for counselling, for arbitration, for simply putting up with a problem because perhaps a law suit could destroy valuable but delicate relationships. The sensitivity and wisdom lawyers need to make these judgments about complex mixes of problems and personalities, are skills developed and honed over a lifetime in the profession, but clients cannot wait for young lawyers to catch up and young lawyers cannot afford to learn exclusively by their mistakes. That is why the work starts early, in the professional formation courses, and why it is essential to have competitions such as this to keep reminding us just how essential this wisdom is, how important it is to seek it early and practice it often.
My own decision, nearly three decades ago, to study for a career in the law was - as it was for a great many of you - profoundly influenced by the experience of growing up in a divided society. I was utterly convinced then, as I am now, that the law offers a humanly decent way to vindicate and protect the rights of the citizen, to challenge and to change society. I was not, of course, unaware of the imperfections that existed within the system. The law was not always blind - people did not always come before it as equals. It was often imperfect; it was frequently slow and in particular slow to reform and re-freshen itself.
On one of the best days this building has seen, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, offering every one of us who share this island and the neighbouring island a radical opportunity to put the past, with all its hurts, behind us and to start a journey to friendship, partnership, to justice, equality and respect. On another wonderful day a new Executive took power here participating in the most adventurous form of participatory democratic politics known to the Western world. Sadly those good days did not last and this building, once a symbolic heartland for some and a “cold house” for others, to borrow David Trimble’s memorable phrase, still awaits the fulfilment of its new destiny as a place of working reconciliation, where peace, prosperity and the interests of all people form the political focus and not the past.
These are days when, as on many occasions in the past, it would be easy to despair. But although it would be easy, it would also be profoundly wrong.
When progress is slow, and when each step forward is painfully won, we can sometimes forget just how far we have travelled, just how new and different the landscape in which we find ourselves really is.
Having seen all that we stand to gain, I cannot believe that anyone would seriously seek to return us to the sterile politics of the past. Having come so far, we cannot go back now.
Our politicians carry an enormous burden of responsibility and many have shown the kind of courage true leadership demands. Yet we must all ensure that the task is not left to them alone. The Agreement could never have been achieved had there not been people in families, community groups, clubs, societies, churches, professional associations - pushing, coaxing and cajoling their friends, their communities to move forward. They challenged orthodoxies and helped us all to think the unthinkable. They knew what the young lawyers here know that you build good human relationships one person at a time, you build them by showing respect for the other, by trying to see life as that other sees it, by not rushing to judgement and by working to create the best possible outcome, one which will sustain, will not unravel, one which will bring stability into future relationships, one which allows people to look forward to the future with confidence.
I hope that in the very near future this building will once again play host to the future, that a new script will be written, making its name a by-word for hope, for co-operation, for tolerance, for partnership, for the inclusion of every citizen’s interests and rights in the vision of those who work here.
Ultimately, whether we are politicians or lawyers, life teaches us the same lesson if we let it. We are given a short span of years to make a difference. We can use that time well or badly as so many have done before us. Those who have come here are people who want to use their time well. They have the humility to admit they do not know everything, the openness to learn, the generosity of spirit to submit themselves to assessment, to judgement, knowing that out of that experience will come wisdom for themselves and wisdom to share with others. You want to be the best lawyers you can be and we wish you well in that, congratulate you on your success and hope that over these days in Belfast you will have created a store of happy memories of people and place. I hope Belfast and Stormont will help you on the journey to achieving your fullest potential, just as I hope this building will soon help to bring those of us who share this island to the fulfilment of the promise of the Good Friday Agreement and our own potential.