The Importance of Listening

Listening is a working skill on the bench, not a courtesy extended when time allows. A judge who has not heard the whole account cannot apply the law to the right facts, and a person who was not heard rarely accepts the result even when it was correct.

It is not a soft quality

Listening tends to get described as warmth, which undersells it. On a bench it is closer to a technical requirement.

A judge applies the law to the facts. If the facts are incomplete, the law is being applied to something that did not happen. No amount of legal knowledge corrects for that, and the error is invisible from the outside because the reasoning looks sound.

So listening is the step that makes everything after it possible. Get it wrong and the rest is precision applied to the wrong thing.

What makes it hard in a parish court

In Michael’s eleven years on this docket, most of the people who appeared had no lawyer. That matters more than it first appears.

A lawyer arrives having sorted the account into what is legally relevant and what is not. An unrepresented person may not have done that, because knowing which is which usually takes training. They will often start somewhere that seems beside the point, because to them it is the reason any of this happened.

A judge in a hurry hears an irrelevance and stops listening. Sometimes it was an irrelevance. Sometimes the relevant fact was two sentences behind it, and it never arrives.

Volume compounds this. On a busy traffic docket a judge hears variations of the same account many times over. The forty-first person sounds like the previous forty. They are not, and treating them as though they are is the most common way listening quietly stops happening.

The arithmetic of attention

Roughly twenty-five thousand docketed matters across eleven years comes to somewhere near two thousand three hundred a year, and a parish court docket does not spread itself evenly across the calendar. A single traffic morning can hold dozens.

That arithmetic is the whole of the difficulty. Listening well to one person is straightforward. Listening well to the fortieth person before lunch, after thirty-nine accounts of the same intersection and the same explanation, is a different skill.

The failure is rarely deliberate. Attention is finite and a busy room spends it. What happens is that a judge starts hearing the category instead of the case, and the category is usually correct, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. Being right about the first thirty-nine is what renders the fortieth invisible.

A judge who has run that docket already knows the pattern from inside it, which is not the same as having read about it.

What it looks like when it is done

Letting a person finish, rather than completing the thought for them. The first version of an account is usually not the clearest one, and the clearer version comes a moment later.

Asking the question that tests your own reading rather than the one that confirms it. If an early impression is forming, the useful question is the one that would unsettle it.

Giving the second account the same attention as the first. By the time it begins, a listener has usually formed a picture, and the effort required to keep it open is real.

Asking a plain follow-up when something does not make sense, rather than assuming the person has nothing. Confusion in the telling is not the same as a weak position.

The questions that open an account

There is a practical craft to this, and it can be taught.

An open question invites the account. A closed question tests a theory the listener has already formed. Both have a place, and the order decides which one is useful: the open question first, before an impression hardens, and the closed one afterwards, aimed at the weakest part of your own reading rather than the other side’s.

Asking somebody to start again from the beginning sounds like an imposition on a full docket. It frequently saves time, because a second telling is almost always shorter and clearer than the first.

Asking what happened next, rather than confirming what you assume happened next, is the difference between hearing an account and auditing one.

And asking whether there is anything a person expected to be asked and was not is probably the most productive question available to a judge dealing with somebody who has no way of knowing what counts as legally relevant.

Where it changes the substance

It would be easy to read all of this as being about atmosphere. It is not, and the clearest way to show that is with the kind of thing that actually goes unsaid.

A person contesting a citation mentions, halfway through an account about something else, that they never received the notice. A person in a small civil dispute says the work was done twice and moves straight past it. Someone explains they could not attend an earlier date and does not think to say why.

Each of those may be legally significant. None of them arrives labelled. They surface in the middle of a sentence about something the person thinks matters more, and they are lost the moment a listener has decided where the account is going.

A lawyer would have put those facts at the front. An unrepresented person may not know they belong there. So the choice a judge makes is between hearing the fact and missing it. Warmth and efficiency are beside the point.

What people take away

There is a pattern anyone who has spent time in a courtroom will recognize. Losing after a real hearing sits better with people than winning after being talked over.

The outcome still matters to them. Being heard and being respected are close to the same thing, and people are quick to detect which one they got.

This is the kind of courtroom people enter over a matter they did not choose. What they conclude about the justice system is formed in that single morning, and it is formed as much from whether anyone was listening as from the ruling.

When there is no ruling to fall back on

Mediation removes the thing that lets a hurried judge get away with not listening.

In a courtroom a decision can issue whether or not both accounts were properly heard. The ruling closes the matter either way. In a mediation nothing closes unless both people agree it closes, and neither of them agrees while they believe they were not understood.

Louisiana district courts have appointed Michael to that role more than three hundred times, including for the Twenty-Fourth Judicial District Court and for the streamlined settlement programs set up after Hurricanes Ida, Laura and Zeta.

Those programs are worth noting for what they involved. Storm-damage disputes put people who had lost a roof, an income or a home across from insurers with counsel and a prepared file. The imbalance in the room was stark, and the only route to an agreement ran through both sides believing they had been heard by whoever sat between them.

What it costs when it fails

The error a hurried listener makes is invisible from the outside, which is what makes it serious.

A judgment reached on incomplete facts does not look defective. The reasoning is sound, the law is correctly stated, and the conclusion follows from what the court actually heard. Nothing on the face of it shows that the account was cut short two sentences before the part that mattered.

Whether anything can be done afterwards depends on how far it went. A genuine denial of the opportunity to be heard raises a question a higher court can consider. An account trimmed a little short, by a judge who stayed courteous and reached a defensible conclusion, usually leaves nothing on the record to point at. The practical protection is a judge who does not let it happen in the first place.

Michael on the practice

Eleven years as a Traffic Hearing Officer and more than three hundred court-appointed mediations are, between them, an enormous amount of time spent listening to people who disagree.

Mediation in particular is nothing else. There is no ruling to fall back on. The entire job is understanding two accounts well enough to find something both sides can accept, which is impossible without hearing each of them properly first.

That is the practice Michael would bring to Division A. It is a commitment about method rather than about outcomes, and method is the only thing a candidate for judicial office can honestly promise.

Questions people ask

Is this harder in a high-volume court?

Yes. Hearing similar accounts repeatedly makes it easy to assume the next one is the same. Volume is the main reason careful listening lapses.