The Law As a Healing Art

Creating wholeness out of illness and maintaining wellbeing are hallmarks of the healing arts. Some medical providers work on the physical body, while others focus on the mind and spirit.

Lawyers are as diverse in the types of work they do as there are different fields of medicine. Regardless of the type of law you practice, your work comes down to advocating and protecting wholeness in our clients lives.

Lawyers are also healing artists, just not in ways commonly thought.

In my last post called The Beacon, I talked about what if all clients experiences with attorneys included feeling respected, listened to and valued. Not from the vantage point of what we think we are doing, but from how your clients perceive you.

How each of us experience being treated is as important as the treatment itself. If I had a choice between two providers with the same treatment plan, one provider really tuning into me while the other took a more mechanic approach, I know who I would pick.

When I first started practicing personal injury law, I assumed that most doctors would agree on not only the diagnosis of a patient, but their treatment plan as well. Was I sorely wrong. The varied approaches to how patients are perceived, diagnosed and the treatment plans prescribed, were more vast than I ever thought possible.

It’s not called the healing sciences for a reason. Just like the human spine, the healing arts are divided up into parts that make up a functioning whole. It’s one part science, one part art and one part outcome. The less you understand about how these three parts work together, the less effective you are — no matter what the science says the outcome should be.

Therein lies the beauty of the work lawyers do. We all go to law school. We can read the same cases and go to the same seminars. We can apply the same statutes and case law to the same set of facts. But the outcome and experience of each client, is going to be different in how the variables manifest through each attorney.

The more you delve into understanding yourself and tuning into your clients, the better able you are to provide true healing within the practice of law. Not only will it be a healing experience for your clients, but for yourselves as well.

Over the next week dig deep into yourself about what a true healing experience feels like for you. Then imagine what would your office, staff and you look and feel like if you designed your practice of law to provide that experience.

And remember, you are in a healing arts profession.