Putting the Personal back into Personal Injury
Why the skills that matter most are the ones we rarely teach
5 March 2026
On day three of my career, I owned one suit, didn't know where the bathrooms were, and was sitting alone in the office when the phone rang. A man told me that if I hung up, he would pull the trigger. Angry and sobbing, he explained he was sitting in his backyard shed with a shotgun.
I was 21. I tried everything I thought a lawyer should do – steering the conversation back to his workers' compensation claim, his medical reports, what we could do next week. None of it worked.
So I stopped trying to be a good lawyer. I just listened. Gradually, something shifted. He started talking – about his daughters, about feeling like he had let everyone down, about the suffocating financial pressure. Eventually, I was able to get emergency services to him. I heard police enter the shed and take the shotgun from his hand.
Nine months later, he won his case. But what stayed with me wasn't the legal outcome. It was how little legal knowledge had to do with what mattered in that moment.
From the Office to the Shed
That experience shaped everything that followed in my career. I called my recent ALA Queensland Conference presentation 'From the Office to the Shed' because that gap – between the air-conditioned desk and the reality of what clients are living through – is where the real work happens. It is the reason I founded Gain Lawyers, and the focus of my presentation: that professional soft skills in personal injury are not optional extras but the bedrock of effective representation.
The complaint that never comes
Here is something I have observed consistently over 23 years. When things go wrong between lawyer and client, the complaint is almost never about legal acumen. It is usually about communication, responsiveness, and whether the client felt understood.
Recent client-satisfaction work by Legal Aid NSW has found that factors like being listened to, not being rushed, and having the process clearly explained are key drivers of client trust and satisfaction, ahead of technical competence.
Compensation-scheme research on procedural fairness and return to work has shown that poor communication and a sense of being treated as 'just another case' are associated with worse psychological outcomes and slower return to work, even when the underlying injury is similar.
The way we conduct the claim doesn't just shape the client's memory of the process – it can influence their health.
Yet in our training, our performance metrics and our firm structures, we overwhelmingly prioritise the technical. We teach procedure, legislation and case law. We measure billable hours and file progression. The skills that clients actually remember – how we listened, how we communicated, how we made them feel during what is often the worst period of their lives – are left to chance.
When listening changes the outcome
To be clear, this is not a call to be 'nicer'. It is a call to be better. These are defined, trainable professional behaviours that directly affect legal outcomes.
I am continually struck by how often the difference lies in something as simple as careful listening. It's usually what isn't said that reveals the true value of a claim.
A few years ago, a client came to me after being pressured to accept a settlement of around $90,000 in hand. Her previous lawyer had strongly recommended she take it and warned the firm might stop acting for her if she refused. During my first conversation with her, something did not sit right. Her economic loss claim seemed unusually low. The reason was obvious once I reviewed the file: her second job – working in a bakery – had never been identified. No one had listened closely enough to understand the full picture of her working life. Once we corrected the claim, the matter resolved for $170,000 in hand. This is what I call translating human experience into strong legal outcomes.
Claims are under-settled not because the law was misunderstood, but because the story was never properly heard.
The skill we cannot automate
As our industry evolves, technology is reshaping how we work. Automation accelerates processes that once consumed hours of manual labour. Artificial Intelligence will inevitably impact how we research, review documents and manage our practices.
These developments invite a question: if the administration and analytical parts of our work can increasingly be handled by technology, what is left that only we can do?
Part of the answer lies in how we communicate. A recent MIT study found that even lawyers themselves understand and remember plain-English versions of legal documents better than traditional legalese. If trained lawyers struggle with dense language, our clients stand little chance.
The deeper answer is direct human contact with the client. Understanding context, reading emotion, navigating cultural difference, managing expectations with honesty and care, and translating a person's lived experience into the legal case it deserves to be. These are not tasks that can be delegated to a system.
If we do not intentionally promote and value these skills, they will be squeezed out by efficiency, technology and commercial pressure. Not because anyone decides they don’t matter, but because the things we measure and reward will crowd out the things we don’t.
Building it in, not bolting it on
The solution is not to lecture practitioners about empathy. It is to build these behaviours into the architecture of how we practise.
That means structured mentoring where senior practitioners deliberately model how they listen, manage expectations and handle difficult conversations – not just how they run files. It means feedback loops: asking clients directly how they are finding the process while the relationship is still intact. It means structured debriefs after every claim that go beyond ‘did we win?’ to ask whether expectations were set early and warning signs of dissatisfaction addressed. And it means aligning incentives: if we reward only billable hours and file progression, communication will erode.
What they remember
Over the years, I have stayed in touch with many clients well after their claims were resolved. They almost never remember the legal arguments or the negotiation strategy. Often, they don't even remember the exact settlement figure.
What they remember is that someone helped them through a difficult period of their life – and how it was done mattered. The four-hour drive to meet someone too ill to travel. The breakfast before a conference to settle their nerves. How can we justify treating the process as secondary, when it is part of the outcome itself?
Every claim has a shed. A hospital room where someone is waiting to hear whether they can work again. A kitchen table at 2:00am with the mortgage calculator open. A car parked outside Centrelink. The advice we give our clients follows them into the same rooms that police, paramedics, and hospital workers enter.
Technical skills build the case. Human skills build the trust that makes the outcome truly worthwhile. Both can be taught, but only one tends to be.
That is what it means to put the personal back into personal injury practice.
The ALA thanks Jeremy Roche for this contribution.
Recommended viewing: Jeremy's Queensland Conference 2026 session 'Putting the personal back into personal injury' is available at the ALA Shop here and is free of charge to ALA members.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the Australian Lawyers Alliance.
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