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A Client's Cultural Background Makes a Difference

By Karen Meislik and Mathias Hagovsky

Typically, each family law attorney's client base is dominated by individuals of a small number of cultural backgrounds. One consequence of having a relatively homogeneous client base is that the attorney, without even giving thought to this, approaches all clients as if they were from those same cultures. Even when recognizing that a particular client comes from a diverse cultural background, the attorney interacts with that client and his or her situation as if that client was like the attorney's “typical” client. Unwittingly, this can lead to a biased handling of that particular client's matter. This kind of “bias,” though devoid of any negative judgments, interferes with the attorney-client personal dynamic and, more critically, can lead to “solutions” that are less satisfactory than those that could have been achieved if the client's own cultural background had been better understood.

To reach an optimal solution to a particular client's set of problems, his or her attorney has to be able to “step into the client's shoes; see through the client's eyes; and hear through the client's ears.” Otherwise, the “solution” can be a generic one, and sometimes that is not good enough. An attorney who “walks through a problem” from a cultural perspective of his or her own, rather than that of the client, is likely to fail to solve the problem for that client. The bottom line is that one must understand a client's particular culture because people with different cultural experiences may deal with things in very different ways.

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