Interviewing, Counseling and Negotiating Skills for Effective Representation

Interpersonal skills are essential in law practice and to the legal process. Lawyers must have have fact-gathering, counseling, and negotiating skills to provide effective representation in private decision-making processes, such as whether a litigation is worthwhile, whether a dispute should be settled, how a contract should be structured, and so on. In Interviewing, Counseling, and Negotiating, Bastress and Harbaugh argue that to best learn the interpersonal skills, one must engage in two processes: first, one must know the theory behind the skills and their implementing techniques; second, one must practice using the theory and techniques. Drawing from other disciplines, this text describes the considerable diversity in approaches to interviewing, counseling, and negotiating.