Becoming an Effective Legal Coach: Understanding Your Client’s Decision-Making Process, Guidelines for Structuring Coaching Sessions, and Compassionate Communication with People of Faith

Episode 49: Becoming an Effective Legal Coach: Understanding Your Client’s Decision-Making Process, Guidelines for Structuring Coaching Sessions, and Compassionate Communication with People of Faith

Jamie Manning is an Unbundled Attorney out of Columbus, OH who has a background working with the Legal Aid Society. When working with her legal aid clients she often only had a limited amount of time to help them with their case. As a result, she developed unique and creative teaching tools that would simply the court process for her clients and were very effective at helping them understand how to properly handle their case. When Jamie launched her own practice, she implemented many of these strategies during her client consultations and when providing unbundled legal services. Today she joins us to share the fundamentals of effective legal coaching. She provides guidelines for how to structure and bill for your coaching calls, tips to help clients remember and apply your advice, and the important points to include during each coaching session. Jamie is also a Christian lawyer and discusses how to communicate with Christian clients and people of faith to help them overcome their apprehension about filing for divorce.

To read a complete transcript of this interview, click here

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The importance of listening to clients with your heart instead of your legal mind, and how that can impact your interactions and communication
• How to help people work through conflicting goals and get clarity on what they really need to accomplish
• Clear guidelines for your initial consultations, including the exact questions Jamie asks her clients and why she asks them
• The different phases of the decision-making process that clients experience, and how to tailor your approach to helping them depending on where they are at in that process
• How she explains full representation versus unbundled services, including exact wording and the main benefits she highlights for each option
• How she structures and bills for her legal coaching sessions
• The process she uses to book clients in for consultations that completely eliminates “no show” appointments from her practice
• Three primary things she likes to coach clients on during every coaching session
• The three types of clients she coaches and how her strategy differs for each
• Some of her unique tools and methods that help clients better understand and apply what she shares with them
• How she provides coaching and limited assistance for clients who have abuse, neglect, or dependency cases
• How Jamie helps clients with a religious background overcome their apprehensions about filing for divorce
• And much more…

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

• Unbundled Attorney Podcast Episode 20: Lessons from 50 years of Practicing Law: Empathetic Listening, Limited Scope, and the Disrupted Legal Market
• Unbundled Attorney Podcast Episode 36: Experienced Social Worker Turned Practicing Attorney: Active Listening, Cultivating and Communicating Empathy, and Understanding the Lifetime Value of Each Client

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For more information about Unbundled Attorney and how our Lead Generation services help grow your practice, visit: https://www.unbundledattorney.com