Laurel E Fletcher & Harvey M Weinstein, “When Students Lose Perspective: Clinical Supervision and the Management of Empathy”

This article examines how law students and lawyers manage the emotional content of their work. Clinical supervisors can enhance the supervisory process by helping law students recognize, discuss, and interpret the emotional experiences of working with clients. Skilled supervision regarding emotions is essential in training law students to manage empathy and identification with a client, which facilitates collaboration and full disclosure on the client’s part. Supervisors can encourage the process of maintaining appropriate use of identification and empathy by instilling in law students three essential skills: self-awareness, boundary setting, and development of the personal and professional self.

This article suggests a model of clinical supervision that supports the development of skills that draw upon the empathic experience of interviewing and draws a connection between “soft” skills and the impact of the lawyer’s career on professional satisfaction and well-being. Supervisors are in a position that involves providing substantive law training but also attending to the issues regarding students’ emotional experiences caused by their legal work. Clinic supervisors should teach both interviewing techniques and discuss the need to pay attention to and interpret their emotional reactions to the client’s or witness’s communications and body language. Supervisors should seek to develop the student as a legal professional and facilitate students’ self-awareness and boundary-setting abilities.

Supervisors can utilize a supervision model that addresses empathy and identification by:

1. Recognizing a problem with identification;
2. Communication with the student about the problem;
3. Initiation of the appropriate corrective response.

Supervisors can recognize a problem with identification by examining the emotional response of a supervisor toward a student; and the factual problems that arise through a student’s behaviour. Supervisors often experience emotional responses to students that often mirror the student’s process vis-à-vis their clients. By being attuned to their own emotional responses, supervisors can better understand clinical students’ experiences, creating an environment of empathy and allowing for more effective problem-solving.

Once it is determined that the student may be experiencing problems, the supervisor can develop a working environment that will facilitate successful discussion of negative responses, by:

1. Establishing and maintaining the learning environment, this should be a consistent process beginning at the start of the semester and should involve the introduction of necessary vocabulary and key concepts including empathy, identification, self-awareness, boundary-setting, and personal and professional growth, and throughout the semester, the supervisor should model these behaviours;
2. Adopting a problem-centered focus, i.e., the problem should be located outside of the student’s personality;
3. Explain the problem – this should be done by asking a serious of focused questions and collaborating with the student to gain an understanding of the student’s perspective and experience of the problem; and
4. Reframing the problem as one regarding professional role – the supervisor should reframe the problem in terms of the professional relationship between the student and the client within the context of legal representation.

Finally, supervisors can initiate an appropriate corrective response by acknowledging that their role is to support the student in changing their behaviour rather than prescribe a course of action. This can be done through collaborative strategy development, maintaining open communication with the student, monitoring the situation closely, and intervening if necessary.

When supervisors emphasize with the student, a framework of trust is developed between the student and the supervisor which may lead the student to explore the motivation behind their behaviour.

Laurel E Fletcher & Harvey M Weinstein, “When Students Lose Perspective: Clinical Supervision and the Management of Empathy” (2002) 9:1 Clinical L Rev 135.