How to Tap Into the Relational and Emotional Side of Law

August 13, 2021

Sophie Alcorn is both a good friend and an incredible lawyer. She has an interesting journey that led her to start her law firm, Alcorn Law. 

As an immigration lawyer, Sophie meets people with incredibly diverse backgrounds every day. This has inspired her to build compassion into her firm. 

She now trains her team to do the same. Their goal is to show their clients the same respect and value that they would in any other relationship. 

What follows are some ways that they do this. You can also apply these principles to infuse humanity into your business.

Alcorn Law Goes the Extra Mile

A lot of volume-based immigration law practices are seen as transactional. The focus is all on numbers. 

However, Sophie believes that law is personal. It’s all about relationships, trust, advising, and counseling. As a result, she and her team always try to go the extra mile in helping their clients. 

They put immigration aside for a moment and ask their clients what they would want if they could have anything in the world. This helps with the legal process because they can’t figure out where to go until they know where their clients dream of going. 

Sophie aims to see the whole person and to go through the emotional journey with them. She knows what it’s like to be processed and put through a system and doesn’t want her clients to feel that way. 

What About Getting Results?

Often, people are attracted to work where they can help people who are going through something they’ve been through. As a result, they are very empathetic. This can, unfortunately, lead to compassion fatigue. Your client’s trauma can retrigger your own.

Many of Sophie’s clients have needed her to be a strong advocate for them. Meanwhile, she couldn’t help but weep over the injustice of their stories and spent a lot of energy on them. She now says that she needed to go through that to get to the other side of her own healing. 

Today, she knows her role in her clients’ lives. She provides advocacy services while maintaining the composition she needs to be that strong advocate. She and her team listen to their clients but also solve problems for them. 

To learn more about infusing law with compassion, check out Episode 024: Infusing Humanity into the Law with Special Guest Sophie Alcorn.

Disclaimer

The materials available at this website are for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Use of and access to this website or any of the e-mail links contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between CGL and the user or browser. The opinions expressed at or through this site are the opinions of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of the firm or any individual attorney.

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