Starting in law school, we are taught how to “represent” our clients. We learn how to advocate for their interests in contract negotiations, how to frame arguments for judges and juries, and how to draft pleadings and respond to discovery in a client’s voice. Representation, we are taught, is about skill, persuasion, analysis, and command of the record. We are to pursue our client’s “objectives.” RPC 1.4(a)(2). It is about mastering the facts and the law and applying them effectively. For years, this served me well.
I have built my practice primarily representing policyholders in insurance recovery and bad faith litigation. For years, I represented these clients against nearly every major national carrier the way I was taught in law school. One case changed that.
My client was a divorced, single mother raising two teenagers. After her home was damaged, a dispute arose with her insurance company over what was owed. The family moved into a hotel, and her daughter ended up moving across the state to live with her father to finish high school. My client was devastated.
That, more than anything, is why I so badly wanted to help her. I have been divorced. I have been a single mom. During that time of my life, I don’t know how I would have handled losing my home and routine. It likely would have broken me. On top of that, as a mother, I could not imagine the feeling of losing the final months of my child’s high school experience. I would feel unbearable emptiness if I were to miss out on the last days of childhood before my daughter launched into the world on her own. I could relate to how deeply my client loved and would do anything for her children. I felt the same way.
But my representation of this client didn’t start out how I imagined. She initially seemed reluctant to trust me; I thought she had no reason to believe I wasn’t doing everything I could for her. She wanted results quicker than I could deliver; I hoped she could be more patient. I continued to go through the standard litigation steps but was often frustrated trying to represent her the same way I had my previous clients.
Then I got a call that my client suffered a stroke.
She survived, but she could no longer speak and was significantly paralyzed from the neck down. Eventually, she began communicating through an eye-gaze tracker, which is a device that allows a paralyzed person to select letters one by one by looking at each letter. While imperfect, this miracle machine converted the letters she selected with her eyes into spelled words and then said them in a computerized voice.
Speaking in this way is a slow process. A sentence that once would have taken seconds to say could now take minutes to spell out. When the device misread a selection, she started over. Because the device delayed, it was hard to know when she was finished saying what she was trying to say. I had no experience with this method of communication and struggled not to talk over her. It was exhausting to watch, but I knew it was much more exhausting for her.
For the first time in my career, I had a client who had so much to say but did not have a voice. It forced me to rethink whether I really knew what I was doing and what representation really means.
Meetings required patience. I had to listen more carefully than I ever had before. Not just to the words said, but to what was behind them. I had already learned much of my client’s story before the stroke. Afterward, I relied on family members to fill in gaps. I quickly realized that effective advocacy and representing my client would require something deeper: I had to try to understand what she was feeling when she could not easily articulate it.
When I asked a question, I watched her eyes. Observing her struggle and knowing how much effort it took to form each sentence, I learned to gently finish them for her. Not to put words in her mouth, but because by then I often understood what she was trying to say.
Her deposition was one of the most difficult I have ever defended. We completed it over multiple sessions of about two hours each. Even this asked a lot of my client. Spelling out answers was painstaking and exhausting for her. I could feel the frustration when the machine selected the wrong letter. When the court reporter didn’t get the spelling or hear the machine say the word, we often had to start again. Opposing counsel, to her credit, remained professional and patient.
What counsel and the court reporter might not have been able to hear was my client’s determination. She wanted so badly to tell her story. She insisted on participating in her own case and seeing it through to trial. She is a fighter. It became my job to try to make sure everyone understood that. But I was worried about whether I could recover enough money for her. I struggled with whether I was a good enough lawyer to make others place value on what she had been through. I wasn’t sure how I would do that without my client being able to get up on the stand and tell her story herself.
I had to learn how to truly become my client’s voice. I knew a jury could connect with her if I could make them understand how this experience felt for her, but I had to get there first. The depth of work I needed to put in to understand and convey my client’s story was more intense than any case I ever had. I forced myself to spend a significant amount of time living in my client’s shoes. It required sincere, patient listening and the ability to be vulnerable to how her story impacted me. I spent time with her. To connect with her and her case better, I recreated scenes she had told me about so that I could experience those moments and try to feel how she felt. I examined the details and worked through key moments of her life before, during, and after the events giving rise to the lawsuit. I reflected on how they made me feel.
As trial lawyers, we pride ourselves on being persuasive. But the real, meaningful work is listening deeply enough throughout our representation to ensure that, when it comes time to stand up to tell our client’s story, the voices the mediator, judge, or jury hear are authentically ours and our client’s.
In this case, my client lost her ability to speak. Representation, I learned, is not merely about advocating on a client’s behalf and pursuing their objectives as the lawyer. It is about being human, spending time with clients, and telling their stories in a way that allows the listener not only to hear them, but to feel them.
I learned what it truly means to represent someone and that each of my clients deserve much more than me promising to pursue their objectives. I learned that the more vulnerable I am and the deeper my connection with my client and their story, the better lawyer I am.
Each of our clients has a story worth telling. We just have to put in the work to find it.
Kathryn Knudsen is a partner at Ruiz & Smart LLP in Seattle. She litigates insurance recovery, bad faith, and personal injury claims on behalf of her clients throughout Washington.
