Law, communication, and psychological type theory.

• Author: Downs, Mayanne
• Position: President's Page

My father taught me to question assumptions, to be sure that the belief you hold is your own. A commonly held belief--or at least a statement--is that legal education doesn't teach how to practice law. (1)

I've always disagreed with this claim, and I suspect that would be so even if I hadn't had such a superior legal education. I am grateful for the education I received and think about that a lot. Perhaps one of the reasons why is that, by happenstance, my law school education included Don and Marty Peters, Don as my civil procedure professor and Marty as a psychologist at the University of Florida College of Law.

Don and Marty believed that if we knew and understood our psychological types--the way we process information, make decisions, and interact with others--then we would be better students; we would engage more actively in the learning process, and thus maximize our efforts.

As incoming law students in January 1985, Marty administered to us the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator[R] test. The test identifies 16 psychological types, but makes no judgment about intelligence, maturity, skill levels, mental health, behavior, or other values. Instead, the test measures between four different preferences: extraversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving.

By understanding where your natural preferences are, you learn two things: One is how and why you make decisions and process information and--just as important--gain an understanding of how and why other psychological types process and apply information.

So what's the point of all of this? Well, for me it led to a greater understanding of how I made decisions, how I could best study, and how I could modify my natural behavior to be a better student. But even more important than that was the knowledge I gained about other people, and how their thought and decision-making processes worked.

Marty and Don were keenly attuned to these intangibles and passed on their insights to us. One of the lessons Don taught my civil procedure class was the value of validation. He gave us examples from his work in clinical practices and explained that the lawyers who verbally acknowledged what their clients were saying (and feeling) made the clients more comfortable, obtained better information, and this led in turn to the clients believing that the lawyers cared about the outcome of their cases. It was simple, he said. Just acknowledge what the client is saying...