“Are You Listening to Yourself?”[1]

Lawyers hear a lot about the importance of being good listeners. We are told not to interrupt clients, ask open-ended questions, put down the phone, and maintain eye contact. All of that is good advice.

But have you ever thought about the importance of listening to yourself? Paying attention to your own thoughts might be just as important when it comes to effective advocacy, counseling, and client relations.

Think about what happens when a client is sitting across the desk telling you about a problem. While the client is talking, another conversation is taking place inside your head.

Our initial reactions often have value. They are informed by years of experience and by lessons learned from other clients and cases. But those same experiences can also cause us to reach conclusions too quickly. Once we decide that a client is unreasonable, a case is weak, or a particular outcome is best, we may start hearing everything the client says through the lens of that conclusion.

Lawyers are trained to know things our clients don’t know. That is part of our job. A client tells us what happened, and we immediately begin identifying issues, evaluating risks, spotting weaknesses, thinking about possible outcomes, and deciding what needs to happen next. The longer we practice, the faster this process becomes.

That is generally a good thing. Experience allows us to recognize patterns. After handling dozens or hundreds of similar matters, we can sometimes see where a case is headed long before the client does.

But experience can also create a problem. We can become so confident that we know what is happening that we stop being curious. We start filling in blanks before the client has finished telling the story. We assume we know why the client is upset. We decide what the client’s goal should be. We hear facts that confirm our initial assessment and discount facts that don’t. Confirmation bias can reinforce that tendency.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that support what we already believe. Once we reach an initial conclusion, our brains are remarkably good at finding evidence that proves us right.

Suppose a client receives a settlement offer that you think is excellent. You have handled hundreds of similar cases. You know what juries do with these cases. You know the weaknesses in your client’s position. You know the cost and uncertainty of continuing the litigation.

The client tells you that she doesn’t want to accept the offer. As she explains why, you may be listening to her words. But you may also be thinking: She doesn’t understand what a good offer this is.

Once you reach that conclusion, the conversation can subtly change. Instead of listening to discover what matters to the client, you begin listening for chances to persuade her that you are right.

You may have correctly assessed the risks and identified what you believe is the best path forward. But “right” can look different depending on what matters most to the client. Your experience can help the client understand the choices, but it can’t decide what the client should value.

Perhaps money isn’t her primary concern. Maybe she wants an apology. Maybe there is a business relationship she wants to preserve. Maybe there is some consequence of settlement that you haven’t considered. Maybe she understands the risk perfectly well and simply has a different tolerance for it than you would. None of those things makes her wrong. They simply mean that her definition of a good outcome may be different from yours.

Your job is to give the client the benefit of your knowledge, experience, and judgment. But that doesn’t mean substituting your preferences for the client’s.

We cannot know what our clients want if we aren’t actually hearing them. And hearing them requires us to listen to our own thoughts.

Lawyers aren’t generally trained to pay attention to their own thoughts while they are listening to someone else. It may even sound a little strange. But it is a skill worth developing.

The next time you are talking with a client, occasionally notice what is happening inside your own head.

The goal isn’t to stop having these thoughts. That isn’t possible, and it probably wouldn’t be desirable. Our reactions are often the product of experience and judgment. They can tell us something important. The goal is simply to notice them.

There is a meaningful difference between thinking, This client is being unreasonable, and thinking, I notice that I am starting to view this client as unreasonable.

The first feels like a fact. The second is something you can examine.

Why do I think that? What has the client actually said? Am I reacting to the client or to my own frustration? Is the client really being unreasonable, or does the client simply value something differently than I do?

Sometimes, after asking those questions, you will reach exactly the same conclusion. But at least you will know how you got there. More importantly, you can decide what to do with that conclusion. You can test it against what the client is actually telling you, ask another question, or simply make sure that your own reaction is not getting in the way of understanding what the client wants.

There is a tendency to think of listening as a soft skill. I don’t think it is. Lawyers are advocates, but we are also counselors. Before we can effectively advocate for a client’s objectives, we have to understand what those objectives actually are.

That requires more than hearing the words coming out of the client’s mouth. It requires enough self-awareness to recognize when our own assumptions, experiences, biases, and preferences might be changing what we hear.

There is also a business reason to care about this. Think about the lawyers you have enjoyed working with in your own life. Chances are, part of what made the experience positive was feeling that the lawyer understood you. You weren’t simply another file containing a legal problem to be solved. The lawyer understood what mattered to you.

Clients who feel heard are more likely to trust their lawyers. They are more likely to feel satisfied with the representation even when the outcome isn’t perfect. And a client who feels understood and well served is much more likely to speak positively about the lawyer and recommend that lawyer to someone else. That isn’t a marketing trick. It is the natural consequence of providing good service.

The next time you sit down with a client, listen carefully to what the client is telling you. But every once in a while, check in on the other conversation taking place—the one inside your own head. Notice the assumptions you are making, the conclusions you are reaching, and the judgments that may be shaping what you hear. You might discover that becoming a better listener to your clients starts with becoming a better listener to yourself.

¹ This article was first published by Lawyers Mutual of North Carolina on September 15, 2026 and authored by Will Graebe. It has been republished with permission.