In response to LETR and the reduction of legal aid funding, we face a changing landscape which will radically reshape the way law is practised and how we think about legal education. In particular, we will have to adapt and refashion our ideas about the lawyer-client relationship towards a more collaborative, mediated or ‘dialogical’ process. Clients will be greater involved in the problem-solving process, and the role of the lawyer will be to guide the client to determine their own options and to make their own decisions.
In urging educators and the profession to take seriously the concept of dialogical lawyering, and building on our previous research into the aspiration to ethical autonomy, we seek to bring light to normative and psychological obstacles the clients may face in decision making, together with strategies from the area of behavioural economics.