Counseling Quiz - Ch. 15-18, 20-21 W2014

P. 375 Client conversations often go back and forth between objectives, options and consequences.

P. 472 No matter how concise and attentive to the vocabulary lay people's a draft is, clients frequently find various provisions confusing. Yet, to avoid embarrassment, clients may not reveal their lack of understanding. Hence, any doubt in your own mind about whether clients understand provisions should prompt you to explain them.

P. 379 While two clients may have what appear to be very similar legal problems, you may suggest a solution to one client that you do not suggest to the other because of differences in their characteristics and circumstances.

P. 390 From the standpoint of the counseling standard, clients who hastily reject options for such reasons (see P. 389-390) arguably have not had a ‘reasonable opportunity’ to make decisions. At the least, compliance with the standard suggests that at some point in the counseling conversations you give clients the opportunity to reconsider hastily-rejected reasonable alternatives. How and when you do so is a matter of judgment, depending in part on your assessment of the reason for the rejection.

P. 428 While client-centeredness puts clients at the center of the decisional universe, you need not automatically accept all decisions that clients make.

P. 372 [A]t the outset of counseling conversations you can ordinarily be content with the objectives that clients mention in response to open questions. Beginning counseling conversations with a litany of closed questions seeking all possible objectives is rarely helpful, because clients often cannot realize that they have additional objectives until they confront decisions that make those objectives relevant.

P. 370 The underlying hypothesis is that you increase the likelihood that clients will make satisfactory decisions if you afford them an opportunity to evaluate options in the light of relevant objectives.

P. 379-380 Effective counseling does not require that you routinely try to dazzle clients by trotting out all possible reasonable alternatives. Instead, common sense and the counseling standard described in Chapter 13 suggest that your task is to provide clients with a “reasonable opportunity” to consider those alternatives that “similarly-situated clients” would be likely to find pivotal. This standard calls on you to apply your knowledge of legal rules and processes to each client’s individual circumstances to formulate a limited number of realistic alternatives that clients are likely to consider satisfactory. For example, while a living trust may be a common estate planning tool that many clients find pivotal, a “living trust” would probably not be a realistic alternative for a client whose estate is too small to require probate.

P. 472 Having preliminarily decided which of a proposed agreement’s terms you want to review with a client, consider providing the client with a “term sheet” to facilitate the client’s active participation in a counseling discussion. A term sheet is simply a short outline of the important provisions that you intend to review in the order in which you plan to review them. While a term sheet is not a substitute for review of agreements’ specific language, a term sheet can help clients understand what issues you consider most significant.

P. 378 Suggesting possible solutions is among your primary counseling functions.

P. 380 You may well find that developing satisfactory alternatives is one of the most creative and satisfying aspects of law practices, in many ways the essence of effective lawyering.

P. 409 In daily life, we are generally content to use vague language when making predictions. However, vague terminology is more likely to create misimpressions than to inform. If you tell a client that she has a ‘pretty good shot’ at winning, she may think she has a 90% chance of success. Meanwhile you, knowing in your own mind that the case was somewhat of an uphill fight from the outset, meant that she had a 60% chance of winning. You may use either percentage estimates or numerical frequencies, though some studies indicate the latter tends to promote clearer understanding.