Crucial Techniques to Help Get the Whole Truth From Your Clients

It's impossible to act as an effective advocate for your client if you don't know the whole story. Criminal lawyers often find it challenging to develop the skills and techniques it takes to build trust quickly and hone their interviewing techniques. In this article, we're going to take a brief look at some crucial techniques to learn if you want to get the whole truth from your clients.

Over time, many attorneys develop the skills they need to build foundational trust with their criminal clients. However, these skills need to be practiced and honed over time to be continually effective. To ensure that you have everything you need to build a fair case for your client, you need to have all the facts. 

Criminal defense clients tend to be fearful, untrusting, and overwhelmed by their situation. Your job is not only to support their legal rights but to educate and advocate. Whether you are a Middletown Criminal Defense Attorney in your first year of practice, or a partnered attorney switching fields to criminal law, you will need to learn and master these skills of trust building. 

Active Listening

Becoming an effective active listener should be a goal to which we all aspire. As an attorney, it is crucial to your investigation and case construction that you have all the facts of your case. Active listening is a specialized technique where you consciously put all of your attention onto another party while they are speaking. 

To master the art of active listening you first must learn to listen to hear and not to listen while waiting to talk. Keep your own thoughts and experiences off to the side while listening until the other party is finished relaying their ideas. At that point, you are ready to repeat the main points back to the party and ask for clarification. Active listening will help your clients to feel like they are being genuinely heard and will help to foster a more trusting relationship. 

Developing Trust

Many criminal clients are fearful and lack trust in any type of authority. It will be difficult to develop a rapport with many of your future clients. However, building trust remains a priority. A client that doesn't trust you is not likely to willingly share essential details of their story that will help you build a fair case. 

One of the best ways to build trust with your criminal clients is to educate them about the law, their situation, and your responsibilities. Ensure that they understand that you are their advocate and legal confidant. This may help your clients feel more comfortable revealing crucial details of their stories. 

Interview Strategies

Developing critical interview strategies will be the key to helping you get the whole truth out of your clients. Every client will be different, with individual biases, experiences, and opinions; you can't successfully use the same interview techniques on every client. In your initial meeting, you should be able to get a general feel for your client and mold your techniques to a style that will work best for the situation. Some common interview techniques include:

● Asking open-ended questions and allowing your client to naturally fill in the details

● Repeating back facts in the correct and incorrect order to help you define the truth

● Using prompts, photos, video clips, and props to help clients recall crucial details

Highly successful attorneys know that it is impossible to build a fair case for their criminal clients unless you have all the facts. Incorporate some of these crucial techniques and strategies to help you build trust with your clients and get the whole story. 

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