 COUNSELING

- The art of giving advice and information

on a particular problem or hypothesis
including the adoption of a course of
action to be taken for the resolution
thereof
 The art of giving advice and information
concerning the solution of a legal
problem arising from a given state of
facts and the adoption of appropriate
reliefs or remedies under the law for the
satisfaction and enforcement of a legal
obligation before a judicial or quasi-
judicial body
 A judicial body or tribunal created by
law vested with jurisdiction or power to
hear and adjudicate litigious conflicts
and to award proper reliefs and render
judgments based upon the evidence
presented.
 Administrative body or agency
belonging to the Executive Branch of the
government vested with jurisdiction to
hear and adjudicate non-litigious cases
brought before it by disputing parties
and empowered to enforce its
judgments and orders like a court of law
and to punish for contempt
 Instrumentality of the executive branch
of the government vested by law with
jurisdiction to settle and adjudicate
controversies arising from the
interpretation, application and
enforcement the law or administrative
rule or regulation
 Process of the extra-judicial settlement of
controversies in the administrative level
before an arbitrator thru the voluntary
will of the parties arising from the
violation of law, administrative rule or
regulation
 extra-judicial process of settling disputes
through the voluntary submission of the
parties before the Barangay Lupon or
other administrative body, usually
arriving at a compromise agreement
which serves as a basis of court
judgment, or as a condition precedent
to vest jurisdiction to a court of law
 Mutual agreement or understanding
usually reduced into writing entered into
and executed by parties and litigants
whether judicially or extrajudicially which
serves as basis for a court judgment
 Act of performing any activity pertaining
to a bona fide member of the bar which
is carried out on a habitual or continuous
process and translated into action by
means of giving legal advice, drafting of
documents or appearance in court or
other administrative or quasi-judicial
body involving the use of faculty or
intelligence of one skilled in law who is
entitled to a legal fee
 The need of seeking and giving legal
advice to potential litigants especially in the
light of our modernized and sophisticated
ways of life and the enactment and/or
amendment of more laws, both substantive
and procedural, cannot be
underestimated. The need for the services
of a lawyer who is trained to assist people
confronted with legal problems becomes a
necessity rather than a mere desire.
 Whether given a choice or not between
two evils of litigious situation, when all
avenues for conciliation are exhausted
with no certainty of a consensus in sight,
then the parties are left with no recourse
in order to protect their interests, but to
go to court. This is because we live under
a government of law and not of men.
 While it may be true that it is every citizen’s
constitutional right to gain access to courts,
yet not all citizens of this country are
privileged to appear or practice before
courts of superior jurisdiction. Only those
who have been admitted to the practice
of law by the Supreme Court after passing
the bar examinations can appear before
superior courts or collegiate courts of
superior jurisdiction. And even in inferior
courts, only persons of proven probity and
ability to prosecute a case and to present
evidence according to the Rules of Court
may be allowed to practice therein.
A. IMPLICIT POLITICAL AND LEGAL
PHILOSOPHY

 Legal counseling operates in a context and

is not just legal. It is a form of political
control or as a directed activity. It
participates in a process of political control.
The lawyer, in one sense, is an instrument for
the tradition and utilization of law, and of
appropriate response to it, by citizen
otherwise engaged in the pursuit of their
affairs.
 Law impinges or may impinge, and
lawyers utilized to maximize and minimize
the effects of law on personal well-being
and on the different kinds of
transactions.
 Clients are typically not directly
interested in knowing or upholding the
law; their concern is how the operation
of law does or may affect them. Their
need for a lawyer may involve, from their
point of view, the circumvention or
subversion of law, or in the upholding of
principles of law.
 Lawyers, in the normal conduct of their
professional activity, are servants to two
masters whose interests may be
disparate.

- The lawyer, in the purview of society

and in the eyes of his client, uphold and
properly implements the law.
 - However, lawyers also contracts with
a client to serve the latter’s interests as best
as possible.

(“Best” service views law as a matter

for dispensation.)
(“Proper” counseling requires that the
law be respected and upheld.)
 Political control, then, is a matter whose
wants and whose philosophy guides the
legal counseling process.

 In the context of two-party relationship,

lawyer and client, political control may
be understood differently.
 The fact that the client consults the
lawyer for his expertise initially seems to
direct control to the lawyer, based upon
the latter’s fund of special skills and
knowledge. This may be licensed only for
narrow purposes to clarify and explain,
and perhaps later, execute.
 Ultimate control may be determined by
which priorities govern:
- client intentions
- lawyer’s self-perceived role
- urgency of legal parameters
- decision complexities extending
beyond legal consideration
- personal and additional professional
resources
- psychological dispositions in matters of
problem-solving and decision-making
B. FORMS OF INTERVENTION IN CLIENT
AFFAIRS

 Lives in being dynamic and evolving

 The “when” of intervention is
characteristically the client’s initial
choice
 The matter of “how” is differentiated
from the “when” of intervention
 A more emphatic and knowledgeable
view of legal counseling contemplates
the lawyer will consider, and help the
client to assess, the various ramifications
of prospective legal transaction or a
legal event.
C. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARTIES

 Counseling, including legal counseling, is

a quality of relationship between human
beings.
 Counseling distinguishes itself in being a
direct relationship toward a helping
purpose.
 An effort to deal with the client’s feelings
of dependency by a response directed
to client’s feelings as well as to objective
circumstances may mitigate the burden
on the counselor to produce an unerring
and winning result for the client.
 Inequality of knowledge and know-how
may cause imbalance and may
contribute to a serious ethical problems.
D. UTILIZATION OF TECHNICAL MEANS AND
COMPETENCIES

 Where there are just too many matters

and affairs to be accounted, reliance on
technology for short-hand answers tends
to become characteristic.
 Legal technology here refers to the
refined and systemized procedures for
dealing with problems that have been
developed in the context of such formal
legal apparatus as trial process,
appellate process, administrative or
legislative process, and the like.
E. LEGAL COUNSELING AS PART OF
COMPLEX PROFESSIONAL OPERATION

 The greatest structural simplicity in legal

counseling is one in which counselor and
client both define and resolve problems
without resort to any outside agency or
other party contract.
 The relationship between counselor and
client deals directly and most
uninterruptedly with their subject states.

 The character of the counseling

relationship is sustained by loyalty but the
counselor is likely to be more persuasive
and challenging in dealing with the
client and the latter’s expectation in the
counselor-client interaction.
A. COUNSELING AS A PROCEDURAL
TECHNIQUE AND SKILL

1. EMPATHY
- is a quality of interest and caring that
one person may feel and perhaps express
toward another, and two parties may
reflect empathy towards one another
2. IMPRESSION AND INFORMATION

 There is a need simultaneously to elicit

and evaluate the reliability of
information, and to differentiate “hard”
information from values, biases,
preferences, and similar attitudinal
characteristics that distinguished
objective and subjective desiderata.
3. ANALYSIS

 Generic term for processing information

 Legal analysis – analysis of the impact of
legal rules and practices on private
interests; germane to legal counseling.
4. SUGGESTION AND DECISION

 Involve the bringing together or closure

of prior counseling experiences in
information gathering and analysis
5. IMPLEMENTATION

 Translation of decision in action

6. RECONSIDERATION

 Frames or at least predicts what will next

be the substance of legal counseling at
some later time if a given matter is not
substantially resolved or client’s
expectations are not met.
 Deals with the client’s current feelings,
expectations, circumstances and/or
status
1. PERSUASION AND ADVICE

 He may be encouraged or led to take or

authorize certain actions on his behalf.
2. FACILITATION

 Counseling is utilized to delineate what

this change or development and how it
might be achieved.
3. PROTECTION

 The lawyer then invokes the law to

protect against substantial risk, having
counseled or advised the client on what
is probably a narrow range of
possibilities.
4. PREVENTION

 The legal counselor seeks to protect the

interest of the client first by assessing the
client’s situation but he additionally
projects future risks and possibilities that
may be as much speculative or
probable as they are real and
immediate.
5. CORRECTION

 The need is to identify and implement

the legal principles and procedures that
will serve to rectify.