Tell me what happened: Pragmatics of affect in legal communication

Abstract

Effective legal communication is crucial in the court of law. A number of studies have been conducted on language and law focusing on topics such as courtroom interaction patterns of prosecutors, defendants and witnesses (e.g., Eades 2000, Ehrlich 2007, Rickford & King 2016). In legal education, the importance of effective communication between attorneys and their clients has been emphasized. For example, listening comprehension skills of legal professionals (Ala-Kortesmaa & Isotalus 2014) or application of conversation analysis in client interviews (Smith 2009) were studied. This study discusses findings from law school students’ professionalization training, namely, witness-attorney interview exams. A total of 391 video-recordings of the exam (in English) were collected in November 2016 at a reputable law school in Hong Kong. 10 top-scoring and 10 bottom-scoring recordings were extracted from the data for the analysis. The exam format was highly standardized; the face-to-face interview was based on the same legal scenario for all student-attorneys, and their task was to deliver and elicit the same information by interacting with a witness. Witnesses were also trained to interact with student-attorneys in advance by going over the legal scenario that they were role playing. After the interview, student-attorneys’ performances were evaluated by faculty members according to a set criteria including their official documentation skills. By using the notion of affect in sociolinguistics, we analyzed interactional patterns between witnesses and student-attorneys in each group. Linguistic (e.g., manners of turn-taking) and paralinguistic (e.g., gesture, gaze) tokens were quantified in order to identify the use of affect in the student-lawyers’ communication. The findings suggest that the display of empathy in the opening sequence determines the success of the interview. That is, those who incorporated affective communication earlier on in the interview ended up with better exam scores.