95. The Value of Empathy, Risk-Taking, and Failure in Law Practice w/ Jordan Furlong

How do you interact with your clients? Is it a clinical, business-only relationship? Could you be more empathetic with your clients? Should you? What is the true value of empathy with your client, both to the client and your business?

Our guest this week is Jordan Furlong of Law Twenty One. Jordan is a legal sector analyst and advisor who’s deeply invested in a better future for the legal profession and the society it serves.

Jordan joins me for a fantastic and lofty conversation about the ways that attorneys are trained to approach clients, care about them and their needs, and view their role in their clients' lives. 

Lawyers are trained to be emotionally divorced practitioners of the law. We're trained not to display empathy for our clients, and to remain neutral and professionally distant. Empathy is often even seen as irrelevant or a waste of time. 

But Jordan argues that we should let those empathetic conversations be our guide as counselors and build trust with the client. We are both a problem solver and anxiety reducer for our clients. 

We discuss ideas on how we can teach the next wave of attorneys to re-think empathy and a general willingness to do things differently. We discuss the value of failure, and how it's hard to accept failure in the legal field, even when innovating. It takes courage to be willing to fail, and taking small risks is the only way forward. 

This is a great chat, and we could all get a lot out of approaching our work this way.

Find Jordan at https://www.law21.ca or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jordan_law21.

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