Procedural Fairness For Courts and Judges   resource and discussion on procedural fairness

For those of you who have watched the procedural-fairness webinar (see our last blog post), you’ve got a good overview of procedural-fairness principles and how they often play out in court. (If you didn’t watch it, you still can—just go here.) Whether you’ve watched it or not, let’s move next to one of the basic skills every judge needs—the ability to be a good listener.

For most of us, our time in school focused to a large extent on developing reading and writing skills; remarkably little time was spent on listening skills. Yet much of the information presented to a trial judge is presented orally in the courtroom—the judge’s ability to do the job well is greatly dependent on the judge’s listening skills.

So what can you do to improve your listening skills? I’ve got a simple suggestion for you, one that you can accomplish with an initial investment of $17 and less than an hour of your time.

The $17 is for an online self-assessment of your listening skills, which comes from a company called HRDQ. The HRDQ Learning to Listen assessment includes both the self-assessment scores of your strengths and weaknesses and HRDQ’s tips for better listening in three areas:
• Staying focused—you can’t effectively listen if you don’t stay focused on what the speaker is communicating.
• Capturing the message—you’re a better listener if you work to hear what the speaker is actually trying to say, not what you expect him or her to say.
• Helping the speaker—you’re more likely to hear what the speaker is really trying to communicate if you avoid behaviors that would distract the speaker and show that you’re open to the speaker’s expression of his or her message.

To be sure, there are constraints in a legal proceeding on the presentation of information to judges. Sometimes, though, we lose track of how difficult it can be in our daily working environment—the courtroom—for others to present information to us. We also can lose focus on how easy it is for us to become distracted or otherwise to miss out on what is being presented.

But in the courtroom, where litigants and lawyers are presenting information to us every day, they have a right to our attention. Spending the time to take the HRDQ Learning to Listen assessment—and then taking a bit more time to think about how the tips HRDQ provides may play out in the courtroom—will make you a more effective judge for 2014.