Law Commons^™

Symposium: Client Counseling And Moral Responsibility, Thomas L. Shaffer, Deborah L. Rhode, Paul R. Tremblay, Robert F. Cochran

Journal Articles

One of the most important challenges to lawyers and clients is addressing issues that are not controlled by law. Will the client take steps (legal steps) that will harm other people? Will the officers of a corporation consider the effects of its actions on workers, on consumers, on the community, on the environment? In a divorce, will the client take actions that will harm a child or spouse? What role should the lawyer play regarding these questions? The way lawyers address such issues may do more to determine whether their practice is socially useful or socially harmful than any rule …

Estate Planning Games, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This paper fits somehow into several years of research and conjecture on legal counseling-the study of what takes place in the law office, in one-on-one relationships between professional and client. Most of my work has been in what is called the "estate planning" field-partly because it is an emotionally elaborate professional activity that takes place in the office, and not in courts or meetings or committees; and partly because it is my primary teaching interest, the field of legal endeavor I know most about.

Experience-Based Teaching Methods In Legal Counseling, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert T. Grismer

Journal Articles

Lawyers spend more time in their offices, in person-to-person encounters counseling troubled individuals, than in any other single area. The alternative to this is litigation, an expensive, inefficient, dis-functional process. Lawyers are counselors, in the most Sartrean sense of the word; whether they intend to be or not.

The presence of the counseling element in most of what lawyers do is subtle, which is probably why we have tended to overlook it. "The more we transform our ways of walking and talking, the better professional people we're going to be," one of our students said, ". . . better able …

Undue Influence, Confidential Relationship, And The Psychology Of Transferenc, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This article attempts to describe a common human relationship as it has been developed in two traditions which are today largely separated from one another. The relationship is referred to as "confidential" in the law and as "transference" in psychoanalytical psychology. Legal insight on the phenomenon is found mainly in the appellate literature on gratuitous transfers obtained by undue influence; psychological insight occurs in the practice and speculation of therapists who have discovered the phenomenon in psychotherapy. Both traditions are useful in understanding the confidential or transference factor in human interaction. The interaction itself has impact beyond the appellate cases …