COUNSELING

Lisa Hanny Setyawati

LECTURES RULES AND REGULATIONS

1. 15 minutes rule: if you attend the class 15 minutes or
more after the scheduled class time, you will not earn
attendance credit for that day.
2. All communication devices must be turned off or on silent
mode during lecture.
3. You are not allowed to talk on the phone in class. In case of
emergency, you have to take your phone call outside.
4. All assignment must be submitted on time.
5. Email: sashasulistiyo@gmail.com

GRADING METHODS
Exam
: 50%
Role Plays/Assgnmnts: 40%
Attendance
& Class Participation : 10%

WHAT IS COUNSELING?
Counsel
[Blacks Law Dictionary]

Advice or assistance
One or more lawyers who represent a
client

WHAT IS COUNSELING?

The process in which lawyers help clients

reach decisions
[Binder & Price, Legal Interviewing and Counseling : A Client Centered Approach 5, 1977]

WHAT IS COUNSELING?
Large definition
: the broad range of consultation lawyers can provide
clients and may involve a variety of functions, i.e.
planning, advice, legal action
Narrow definition
: group of particular attitudes, skills, and strategies that
a lawyer utilizes mostly in his office to help individual
clients to meet specific needs and resolve specific
problems
[Robert Redmount, An Inquiry To Legal Counseling, The Journal of The Legal Profession, The University of Alabama School of
Law, 1979]

COUNSELING
1. Preparation
identifying the clients goals, developing 2 or
more alternative potential solutions that, to varying
degrees, might accomplish those goals

2. Meeting
a meeting with client in which the lawyer explains
the potential solutions so the client can choose
between or among them

FUNCTION OF COUNSELING
1. to encourage client participation and understanding
2. to make the client aware and to relieve, so far as reasonably
possible, distortive emotions that prevent adequate and proper
understandings
3. to insist on a full exchange of information and on clear
reasoning, to the limits of the client's abilities
4. to be constantly vigilant about deception and manipulation and
for reinforcing trust and belief

PURPOSE/AIM OF COUNSELING
1. Persuasion and Advice
Persuasion and advice may precede decision and then lead to implementation,
or it may be or be construed as a decision in itself to be accepted and to govern.
Advice may be a product of helping the client, through counseling, to derive
greater or different insight into himself and his circumstances. Prudent advice,
by the legal counselor, is likely to be the product of a studied inquiry into the
client, analysis of circumstances and possible resolutions, and consideration of
risks and outcomes.
Good advice may be a kind of summation of a large part of the counseling
experience.

PURPOSE/AIM OF COUNSELING
2. Facilitation
Legal counseling is an instrument to facilitate some change or
development in the client's condition or circumstances that the client
declares and hopes to achieve.
Counseling is utilized to describe what this change or development might
be and how it might be achieved facilitation occurs.
Facilitation the counselor helps the client to realize the clients desires
in a concrete form, if that is at all legally possible. The client seeks and the
counselor renders.

PURPOSE/AIM OF COUNSELING
3. Protection
Legal counseling, with the objective of protection, is most often a matter of
objective fact ascertainment correlated with an assessment of the risk of
harm to the client
The lawyer invokes the law to protect the client against substantial risk, or
advised the client on what is probably a narrow range of possibilities.

PURPOSE/AIM OF COUNSELING

4. Prevention
The legal counselor protects the interests of the client by assessing the client's
situation, then projects future risks and possibilities.
In this function, the legal counselor runs processing experiences in counseling:
- fact inquiry,
- various analyses,
- suggestions and decisions,
- conclude with planning and implementation.

PURPOSE/AIM OF COUNSELING
5. Correction

In matters of correction, the risk or harm is generally known and immediate.

The need is to identify and implement the legal principles and procedures
that will serve to rectify. The follow up is to observe that correction has taken
place.
Essential information is largely specific and determined.

THE CHARACTER OF LEGAL COUNSELING

1. Implicit Political and Legal Philosophy
Counseling a form of political control, or as a directed activity, it participates

legal in a process of political control.

The lawyer an instrument for the translation & utilization of law

2. A Form of Intervention in Client Affairs

i.e. a married couple who seek legal counseling on buying property; or a
company who intends to build new factory

THE CHARACTER OF LEGAL COUNSELING

3. Relationship Between Parties
Counseling is a quality of relationship between human beings.
Counseling distinguishes in being a directed relationship toward a helping
purpose. One party needs help and the other party has the means to provide the
help.
Legal counseling may raises some troublesome issues of a psychological, social,
political, and ethical nature.

4. Utilization of Technical Means and Competences

Where clients issues is clear and certain lawyers knowledge and skills is
required on counseling clients, i.e. elaborating consequences and effects on
what options the client have on legal actions.
A legal counselor recognized both an opportunity and a responsibility not only
before but also after the event occurs to deal with the effects of legal
intervention on a clients life and circumstances.

THE CHARACTER OF LEGAL COUNSELING

5. Legal Counseling As Part of a Complex Professional
Operation
Counselor & client both define and resolve problems without resort to any outside agency
or ther party contact.
The making of a will
The lawyer prepares, the client executes the will
A subtantial amount of legal counseling may take place in this closed transaction.
The relationship between counselor and client deals directly and mosty uninterrupted
by other party.

Acquisition Negotiation
The client asks the legal counselor to represent them on the negotiation.
The legal counselor deals with the client, then with a third party. Each counseling
contact with the client may involve dealing with new or altered facts or other
consideration.
The counselor faces two ways in alternating fashion, toward his client for the purpose
of counseling and toward third parties for the purpose of negotiation.

TYPES OF LEGAL COUNSELING

1. Transactional Counseling
2. Dispute Resolution Counseling

TYPES OF LEGAL COUNSELING

1. Transactional Counseling

For organizational client

how to structure deals with other organizations and how to conduct their
affairs to minimilize their taxes and their legal liability
Legal advice might be given in varying degrees of formality:
Answering a point-blank question from the client, often over the
telephone
Participation in business planning in a meeting
Counseling about a transaction that is in the formation stage

For individual client

Mostly about private matters, i.e. How to plan an estate, buy property,
etc

TYPES OF LEGAL COUNSELING

2. Dispute Resolution Counseling

Prelitigation

The lawyer helps the client decide whether a lawsuit would be worth the
effort, stress, and expense.

During Litigation

Settlement offer, to accept or to go to trial

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
1. Empathy

a quality of interest and caring that 1 person may feel and perhaps
express toward another

Counseling without empathy very often ignores the human dimensions

of experience and is likely to be a technical exercise, sufficient for
technical problems but hardly for complex, risk-bearing human
involvements

a client who is not comfortable in his relationship to his legal counselor is

likely to be less candid and less participatory than would best serve his
interests.

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
2. Impression and Information

The voluntariness of the client in rendering information and the

receptiveness of the counselor in receiving it, form an important foundation
on which legal counseling and intervention in client affairs takes place.

The attitudes, of both client and counselor, are sources of distortion that go
both to the character and extent of information acquired, and to the total
reliability of information.

Glib impression or narrow conception may substitute for reflective inquiry

into facts.

The complexity of the information-gathering and information sifting process

suggests that it may be preeminent in importance in legal counseling.

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
3. Analysis
Processing information
Analysis in legal counseling may deal with a variety of:
- needs
- desires
- facts
- issues
- risks
- effects, and
- consequences.

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
4. Suggestion and Decision
Suggestion and decision involve closure of prior counseling experiences in informationgathering and analysis.
Suggestion is in the nature of a hint, advice, most often recommended by the counselor but
sometimes by the client.
Suggestion invites reaction, sometimes reformulation and the proffering of alternatives. It
aims at decision.
Decision is commitment to a risk and result; the risk mostly undertaken by the client and
the result usually contemplated by both counselor and client.
Legal counseling, may come off best in the decision-making phase of the counseling
process.
Lawyers are able to be and are taught to be decisive.
Empathy may be slighted and analysis may be narrow but decision, at least in the sense of
certainty and commitment to action, is likely to be characteristic.
Decisiveness can be preemptive a major risk in legal counseling where ready-made legal
answers are often available that do not seem to necessitate other kinds of client
consideration or non legal outcomes.

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
5. Implementation
the translation of decision into action

The legal counselor must draft a will or contract, file a complaint or an

answer, undertake a negotiation or construct an elaborate business or
estate plan

Implementation involves a breadth of intellectual, organizing, and

possibly influencing and management skills

If decision is the ending process then implementation produces the

end product. It typically produces a viable result that encompasses and
briefly expresses what has gone before in the counseling process

LEGAL COUNSELING
TECHNIQUE & SKILL
6. Reconsideration
Reconsideration may need further information gathering
and sifting, more analysis, and perhaps the reformulation
of some suggestion and decision.
It is in the nature of follow-up and concern for outcomes
that legal counseling not be thought to end absolutely, nor
is the process irrevocably negotiated.

COMPETENCE IN COUNSELING
A. Lawyer as Counselor

The lawyer as counselor optimally possesses the following criteria:

- concern for other human beings
- inquisitive capacity
- ethical sensitivity and moral disposition
- modest temperament devoid of exceptional needs, and thrusts
- analyzing and synthesizing intellectual capabilities
- intuitive disposition
- capacity for projection and developing perspective
- ability to translate and articulate perceptions and insights

The lawyer must be able to work comfortably between a psychological

framework of dispositions, needs and demands, an empirical framework of
impressions, events and urgencies, and a legal framework of rationality, order,
and compulsion.

COMPETENCE IN COUNSELING
A. Lawyer as Counselor
An essential qualification of the legal counselor are:
- self knowledge and knowledge of others in terms of personal feelings, biases,
powerful needs and demands, and limitations on perception and performance
- has reasonably knowledgeable of the economic, social, ethical, psychological,
and other frameworks in which clients operate
- able to work comfortably between a psychological framework of dispositions,
needs and demands, an empirical framework of impressions, events and
urgencies, and a legal framework of rationality, order, and compulsion
- knows how to construe, combine and integrate his knowledge of law into the
configuration of other frameworks of experience, economic, psychological,
etc., that characterize the client's situation

COMPETENCE IN COUNSELING
B. Persons as Clients
Challenge for legal counselor that may face from the clients in conducting
counseling:
- Passive
the inability to interchange of feelings, thoughts and preferences, and of
information, ideas, decisions and solutions
- Emotional distention
an excess of hostility or fear or anxiety or emotional confusion acts to distort
true needs , desires, clear understanding and choice

- Intellectual limitation
a function of restriction or distortion of information, careless thinking
- Deception and manipulation
personal relationship, social intercourse, and most transactions are based on
assumptions and on regularities in communications and clearly stated or
apparent intentions

STEPS OF LEGAL COUNSELING

1. Identify the Problem
Focus on the clients goals

2. Gather and evaluate information and raw materials that can

be used to resolve the problem
3. Generate potential solution to the problems
4. Evaluate each potential solution to measure its advantages,
costs, risks, and odds of success, explain those predictions to
the client, and incorporate the insights of the client
5. Choose the best potential solution
6. Act on the solution chosen

CHALLENGES IN LEGAL COUNSELING

1. Creating Options
2. Working out each option precisely
3. Clarity with the client
4. A helpful professional effect

THANK YOU