We Don't Care about What Happened, We Only Care about What Is Going to Happen: Lawyer-Client Negotiations of Reality

When a person in trouble seeks help from a professional, one of the first tasks is to define the situation. A definition includes a description of what happened, an evaluation of what ought to happen, and a prescription for what is going to happen. Definitions are negotiated between the helper and the client, and relative power over the negotiation process reflects power over the resulting definition. The author observed initial interviews between lawyers in a legal-services-for the-poor program and their clients in order to discover relative degrees of power and describe the process of exercising control in professional-client relations. Paralinguistic aspects of exchanges, floor control (control over the timing of utterances) and topic control (control over the topic of conversation) were coded. Follow-up data on lawyers' perceptions of clients and the degree of effort expended by lawyers were collected. Lawyers exercised considerable control with little variance between lawyers in the sample. Clients differed in their persistence in attempting to control the definition that emerged during the encounters. The lawyers perceived persistent clients to be hostile, but expended more effort on their cases. The lawyers' control over the definition reflects an orientation toward highly standardized legal and organization remedies. The lawyers' emphasis on “what is going to happen” led to their attempts to fit the definition of “what happened” into predetermined categories. A division of control resulted with lawyers exclusively controlling what, if anything would be done, while clients exercised more control over when and how much would be done.