Current trainings are listed here.
CLE Integrative Client-Centered Model (ICCM): Foundations of client counseling
4-session/4-week CLE
October 2024
The Conflict Science Institute is hosting a Zoom CLE teaching Integrative Client-Centered Model foundations in October 2024. Sessions are 2-hours each, once a week over 4 weeks. The ICCM is a counseling and conflict management model for legal professionals offering an updated client-centered approach using neurobiology and relationship science.
Ambitiously, we’ll start by learning a 2-pattern model, from developmental psychology, of human conduct and information processing in the context of danger (i.e., litigation). We’ll see how exposure to relational danger affects the way people think, feel, act, and communicate, and how their “defense mechanisms” express. We’ll also learn some technical discourse analysis techniques to help you identify the patterns of unclear and dysfunctional communication.
We’ll then look at a collection of skills and tools for counseling, case and narrative building, and supporting client decision making. As we cover these, we will keep an eye on how to recognize which pattern your client is negotiating life with, and how to adjust your style to meet theirs to optimize client-decision making and satisfaction.
In 2025, CSI will host more of these Foundation sessions, and add advanced sessions for family law, DV, high conflict, advanced discourse analysis, and an attachment-specific course. The 4-session Foundation course is a prerequisite for the advanced sessions and courses. Detailed information about the CLE sessions are below. Here is more information about the ICCM.
Key topics include
- Using adult attachment theory and technical discourse analysis for understanding self-protective responses and information processing bias
- Integrative Listening: 10 essential elements of listening
- Advanced emotion theory using affective neuroscience and a “Panksepp Feelings Wheel”
- The CSI attachment-informed 6-Step Change Process
- Techniques and tools for client counseling, grounding skills, investigation, case and narrative building, and supporting client decision making.
Key learning points
- Research shows the four things clients want most is to know you care about them, for you to hear them and their needs, can make sure they understand the advice you are saying, and can give them a voice in the process, CSI will provide tools to achieve these goals, and improve case outcomes
- What Binder’s book Lawyers as Counselors misses
- Help the client get an optimal outcome and believe it
- Enhance investigation, examination, and cross-examination skill
- Enhance effective client participation
- Increase retain rate
- Increase collection rate
- Reduce complaints
- Enhance client and own-wellness (manage secondary trauma)
Written materials will be provided, sometimes before the session starts, so register at least a few days beforehand to get these.
CLE details
DATES: First four Tuesdays in October 2024: 10/1, 10/8, 10/15, and 10/22. Missed sessions can be made up in subsequent ICCM foundations CLEs, or with paid private group sessions.
TIMES: 10:50 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Seattle time.
LOCATION: By Zoom only, not in-person.
COMPLEXITY LEVEL: Moderate, designed for anyone but goes well beyond basic client counseling and the ACES research.
CLE CREDIT: 2 per session, 8 total WA CLE credits are being applied for. (We expect the WA category will be legal or other credits.) Participants must apply on their own for credits in other states.
COST: $120, free for all current members of the WSBA Low Bono Section.
SESSIONS ARE FOR: Lawyers, LLLT’s, paralegals, legal assistants, law students, arbitrators, mediators, GAL’s, parenting coordinators, parenting professionals, and any other person providing services in the legal industry.
CERTIFICATE: ICCM Level I Certificate of Completion, for attending all four sessions. (Certificate allows application to attend CSI’s advanced trainings, including attachment.)
CONFLICT SCIENCE LISTSERVE: Application to the free listserv is available after attending any two sessions.
TRAINER: Mark Baumann, JD, will host each session. He has 36 years of experience in litigation and mediation, 3 years as the first associate of Bill Eddy’s High Conflict Institute, an LLM equivalent in Interpersonal Neurobiology (“client relationship science”) in 2013, and 12 years studying and using DMM attachment theory (in part for discourse analysis). Mark began developing the ICCM in 2012. Please note, no legal advice will be provided in this CLE. Full resume here.
PROGRAM DETAILS: Session topics in some detail below. This page describes the ICCM. This (long) article describes what attachment theory and science is and why it provides the best foundation for understanding client conduct.
REGISTRATION: Contact Mark to register, and for a payment link if you are not a Low Bono Section member. Mark@MarkBaumann.com, 206-851-9337.
A short description of the ICCM
The ICCM is a framework, model, and component system. Practitioners can use certain components individually, and the collective model comprehensively. It allows for flexible adaptation of additional and new components as needed by the professional. It provides a basic counseling framework and a comprehensive counseling model with specific counseling components. The ICCM is built on strong science-based components and honed in the practice of relationally-focused family and criminal law litigation and mediation.
This article provides a more comprehensive description of the ICCM.
The basic ICCM framework involves five parts (which will be covered across four sessions for the Foundations CLE)
- The human element
- Relationship skills
- Case and narrative building skills and tools
- Plan execution
- Integration with five R’s: regroup, reflect, reinforce, re-build, re-execute
CLE session details
Session 1, Tuesday, October 1 2024: DMM attachment science for describing the human element, and discourse analysis I
All clients seeking legal help are facing some sort of tremendous danger, and are seeking protection from it. We’ll use a simplified version of the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM) for the “human element” component. The DMM is the advanced model of attachment, and it describes in great detail a relationship-based human survival system, and how humans respond to danger.
Why attachment theory? Children have to engage in conduct to motivate their parents to provide the most protection and comfort they can. The self-protective strategies they use develop into more complex conduct in adulthood. Attachment science has identified two primary patterns of how humans think, process emotions, develop instinctive behavior patterns, and communicate in the context of exposure to stress or danger. All of these elements combine to impact information processing and communication styles. We’ll look at why this is, what this means, and what the two patterns generally look like.
Discourse analysis is one way attachment science assesses an individual’s pattern, and we’ll work with some DMM discourse clues, using discourse codes with real examples of attachment-influenced speech.
CSI will provide you with a 1-page pattern recognition table, and a 1-page discourse codes sheet, and a printable CSI-DMM Circumplex, and references to articles for more information.
Please note: We will quickly dive deeply into adult attachment patterns. Studying “conflict psychology” and attachment can be triggering for some people. If you have experienced significant trauma in your life, we expect you should have some good supportive structures, a tolerance for self-reflection, and an ability for self-compassion.
Session 2, Tuesday October 8 2024: Discourse analysis II, a key relational skill, and the Zone of Proximal Development
CSI will provide a 2-page pattern identification chart and 2-page discourse analysis codes list and we will continue an exploration of attachment patterns their impact on information processing with more examples. We’ll look at some celebrity examples of classic attachment pattern presentations to put some meat on the bones.
Listening is a critical relational skill. We’ll identify several listening models, and look in detail at CSI’s Integrative Listening (IL) model, which offers a daily go-to model designed for lawyers with 10 essential elements of listening. CSI will provide an article on Integrative Listening.
Identifying and managing emotions is the next key skill, especially as your listening skills expand. Emotion science is tricky, because it is still in the very early stages of development and there’s lots of confusion and noise in the field. We’ll identify a couple of go-to models, including the fun but simplistic Feelings Wheel, Paul Eckman’s model, and dive into Jaak Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience model. Panksepp, now deceased, was considered a superior scientist and his research into the neuroscience of the brain identified seven primary process emotions. He offers a nice distinction between emotions, feelings, and affects. CSI’s will provide an Affective Neuroscience Emotion-Feeling-Affect Chart.
An overarching goal of the ICCM, when possible, is to help clients improve their understanding of their problems and methods to solve them, and in some cases to help them learn how to contribute to handling their own case. In family law, our help and teaching can extend past the litigation. But they can only learn so fast. We’ll look at Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) concept for a framework of how to help clients expand their capacities. Then we will look at a couple of supportive counseling techniques.
Session 3, Tuesday October 15 2024: 6-Step Change Process, grounding skills, counseling skills, investigation tools, decision making support tools
In an effective and supportive client-centered approach, the client will most likely be changing parts of their thinking and goals. Danger triggers their self-protective attachment strategies, which commonly causes them to elevate self-survival at the cost of some other serious needs, such as their finances or needs of their children.
Through counseling, the issue is not just to identify their attachment pattern and defensively excluded information, it’s to help them feel safe, bring in new information which may be scary, and to see if they can elevate all of their needs with your support. Sometimes this involves a tricky process which can backfire. The ZPD is one tool for managing this, and CSI’s 6 Step Change Process is another, offering a more detailed component which specifically includes attachment awareness. We’ll work through that with an example and CSI will provide a graphical version.
We’ll look at a collection of specific skills and tools for grounding emotions, counseling techniques, and investigation and decision making tools. All the while, we’ll be considering how to apply them differently for each of the two attachment patterns.
These will include compassionate Socratic questions, genograms, Settlement Maps, Self Owned-Ideas (SO-I), and how to respond to hostile communication. CSI will provide a list of grounding techniques.
Session 4, October 22 2024: Counseling and managing the patterns; Narrative and case building; Equipoise for lawyers; Executing the plan; Integrating experiences with the 5 Rs: Regroup, reflect, reinforce, re-build, re-execute;
In the final session, we’ll bring things together.
We’ll look at counseling and communication techniques specifically targeted to the A and C attachment patterns. CSI will provide a list of techniques.
We’ll look at how to build the case and client narratives with an attachment perspective, refining the prior learning.
Equipoise is a state of mind and an approach to the case before you execute any action plan. It’s a way for lawyers to maintain a balanced approach and not get sucked into client emotions. We’ll talk about one of the specific attachment patterns which presents a serious risk for a failure of maintaining good ethics and self-protection for the lawyer. A CSI article with examples will be provided.
We’ll look at how to develop case plans and then execute them in a way that promotes positive feedback whatever the outcome.
After a specific action step is taken, there is an opportunity for reflecting and integrating lessons learned. We’ll look at how to leverage that with the tools provided in previous sessions, and how use the reflection period to strengthen the client and their case.
We’ll briefly cover some business practices which support the client-centered approach.
2025 follow up sessions
In 2025, CSI will offer sessions which build in the learning in the ICCM Foundations series. These will include sessions focused on family law, criminal law, domestic violence, advanced discourse analysis, and understanding attachment theory and science. Completion of the ICCM Foundation series is a pre-requisite for these additional sessions.
