Module 2

Active listening: attending, silence, reflecting and summarising

Active listening is the set of skills that let the other person know that they have been heard, and let you check that they have. It comes from the work of counselling and psychotherapy (notably Carl Rogers), and has been taken up in mediation, negotiation, medicine, policing and law, because it works: people give fuller and more accurate accounts to a listener who is plainly attending, who does not hurry them and who shows that they have understood. The techniques are simple to describe and hard to do while thinking about the law. They include attending (posture, eye contact and presence), using silence, small signs of encouragement, paraphrasing the content, reflecting the feeling, summarising and checking. They also include taking notes without losing the person, listening on a call or through an interpreter, and listening to anger and distress. This module teaches each, with the cautions that matter in legal work: reflection is not agreement, a lawyer is not a therapist, and these techniques must never be used to manipulate. The course’s tools come later; here the practice is in the labs. All the people are invented.

General education on listening and interviewing, using invented people, firms and events. It states psychological research in broad terms and is not a substitute for specialist training, and it is not legal advice. Rules on interviewing, contact with witnesses and represented persons, recording and the interviewing of suspects and vulnerable people differ between countries and change: check the rules that apply to you and take advice.