Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Legal Aid NSW Local Court criminal lawyer Matthew Wade highlighted the importance of enhancing client interaction skills for legal professionals. He discussed various initiatives and organisations that can help lawyers improve their ability to connect with and support their clients, ultimately leading to more effective legal practice.

Wade recognised that these skills don’t come naturally to everyone, underscoring the importance of continuing education and professional development to build and refine these capabilities.

“It’s definitely a skill set that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everybody, and that’s not to say to speak down or to sound condescending about where it might not come naturally because everybody has strengths in different areas.

“But if we acknowledge that it doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone, then it’s certainly something that is, in part, and should continue to be built on through education, like your continuing professional development and other in-house training packages,” he emphasised.

One initiative that Wade outlined is the National Legal Aid’s With You project, which provides trauma-informed and rights-based legal services training for solicitors.

“We’re lucky at the moment that National Legal Aid is supporting and leading the With You project, [for] which they are developing training packages for trauma-informed and rights-based legal services for solicitors.

“They’re still building on the overall project, but it’s being rolled out, and there are toolkits available,” he said.

For lawyers not affiliated with Legal Aid, Wade offered advice for these practitioners and suggested that lawyers reach out to local services that support individuals navigating the criminal system.

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“Something that they should consider is reaching out in their particular area, reaching out to localised services that provide support to people that are going through the criminal justice system,” he said.

Wade also suggested attending conferences hosted by these organisations offers valuable insights into trauma-informed practice.

“If they were to reach out to those services, what I’ve found through attending various conferences is that each of those services generally have either trauma-informed based service that they provide or are part of their organisation and reaching out to those people.

“They also are generally linked in with people who are prepared to volunteer their time as experts in lived experience,” he said.

“Simply reaching out to those organisations and asking, what can I do better? Or what do you do for your clients that I could perhaps start implementing in my firm or my practice? That would probably be a good localised way to do it,” he expressed.

While initiatives like With You may not be directly accessible to all lawyers, Wade highlighted that resources from National Legal Aid organisations are accessible and can be utilised by lawyers.

“But the With You training package is being supported by National Legal Aid, and National Legal Aid websites are open source and available to everyone. They can go to the National Legal Aid website, access the ‘With You’ training program page and request the toolkit.

“It also has a lot of information there about who was, who was spoken to or consulted during the development of the project,” he said.

Through utilising such information and resources, Wade expressed how it can inspire practitioners to create a tailored toolkit for their practice.

“That could also give practitioners perhaps some ideas about putting together their own in-house or much smaller version of sort of a toolkit about that would be relevant to their specific practice, noting that this is not only relevant for criminal type matters, but it’s also highly relevant for criminal type matters.

“But we would all acknowledge that across the board, family, civil immigration, all of those types of law practice at some stage are going to deal with people who have lived, experienced trauma, and they’re going to need to make sure that they can temper how they do things or address how they do things with those people in a trauma-informed way,” he said.