Holding the room: the difficult client, the high emotion and the practitioner who has to stay steady

By Sonja Cilliers and Maryke Swarts, PMRI · 12 September 2026

The client who arrives angry and leaves angrier. The client who breaks down at the mention of the children. The client who blames you, personally and at length, for an outcome the law produced. The client who telephones in a panic at nine on a Saturday and cannot be talked down. The board member who treats the general counsel’s cautious advice as obstruction and says so in front of the executive. Every practitioner has these people in their week, and every practitioner has felt, in the moment, the pull to either match the emotion or shut it out entirely.

Both pulls are natural, and both cost the practitioner something. Matching the emotion loses the capacity to advise, because two agitated people in a room produce heat and no decisions. Shutting it out loses the client’s trust in the short term and, over years, the practitioner’s own capacity to feel anything in the room at all, which is where the flattening that senior practitioners describe usually begins. The skill is a third thing, and it can be learnt. An attorney we will call Lerato, who runs a small family and estates practice, describes learning it in her eighth year, after a consultation in which a bereaved client shouted at her for twenty minutes and she said nothing useful in reply. She has taught it to every candidate attorney she has had since.

What is happening in you

When a person in front of you is in high emotion, your nervous system responds to theirs before you have decided anything. Anger in the room raises your own arousal, because the older parts of the brain read anger as a possible attack. Distress in the room pulls at you, because human beings are built to move toward a member of the group who is suffering. Blame directed at you triggers the same threat response as a physical challenge would, with adrenaline to match. All of this happens in fractions of a second, well ahead of thought, and it is the reason the practitioner’s voice tightens, the reply comes too fast, or the mind goes blank at the moment it needs to be clearest.

Understanding this changes the goal. The aim is to notice the pull early and to keep the reasoning part of the brain online while the emotional part does what it does, rather than to feel nothing. A practitioner who feels nothing in a room with a weeping client has lost the instrument the work depends on. A practitioner who feels it and stays steady has the instrument and the use of it.

Holding the room

The first move is physical and invisible: slow the breath out. A longer out-breath, twice, before you answer, brings arousal down enough for the prefrontal cortex to stay in charge of what you say next. The out-breath works because it engages the part of the nervous system that lowers heart rate, and it works whether or not you are thinking about it. The pause also reads as composure to the client, which is itself steadying for them, since an agitated person in a room with a calm one tends, over a few minutes, to move toward the calm.

The second move is to name what is in the room, briefly and without comment on it. “This is a hard thing to hear.” “I can see how angry you are about this.” Naming an emotion lowers its intensity, both in the person feeling it and in the person witnessing it. Lieberman and colleagues found, using brain imaging, that putting a feeling into words reduces the response of the amygdala and engages the prefrontal regions that regulate it, a process they called affect labelling. The sentence commits you to nothing, neither to therapy nor to agreement, and it is what lets the consultation continue. It is remarkable how often a client who has been named in this way takes a breath and starts again in a different register.

The third move is to separate the feeling from the decision. “You are furious with him, and we still have to decide by Friday whether to accept the offer.” The client’s emotion is acknowledged and set beside the task rather than in front of it. This matters because the client’s own prefrontal cortex is as impaired by the emotion as yours would be, and most clients cannot make a decision while the feeling is still unacknowledged and demanding attention. Once the feeling has been seen, the decision becomes possible. Lerato describes this as “giving the feeling a chair, so that it stops standing in the doorway”.

The fourth move is the boundary, stated plainly when it is needed and not before: “I will not be spoken to like that, and I want to help you. Let us start again.” Clients in high emotion often do not know they have crossed a line, and the practitioner who names it calmly, without heat and without threat, usually gets an apology and a better consultation. The practitioner who lets it pass gets a worse one, and then a worse one the week after. The same sentence, adjusted for the room, works for the general counsel facing an aggressive executive, where the line is crossed less loudly but just as clearly.

The same room at different levels

The candidate attorney meets these clients without the authority to end the meeting, and the fourth move can feel unavailable. It is available, though it is said with a senior’s backing, and the senior who tells a junior in advance that they are permitted to hold that line has given them something more useful than another precedent. The partner meets these clients with the added weight that the client is also the fee, and the pull to absorb whatever is said in order to keep the work. That pull is worth noticing, because the practitioner who absorbs everything is the one who flattens first. The senior advocate meets the emotion at one remove, through an instructing attorney, and often meets it hardest in the consultation before trial, when a client realises what the evidence will do to them under cross-examination.

Afterwards

The consultation ends and the practitioner’s nervous system is still up, because the body does not know the client has gone. A few minutes before the next task, spent deliberately rather than on email, lets the arousal come down. A short note on what was said and what happens next takes the load out of working memory and puts it somewhere it can be left. Practitioners who do this consistently find that difficult clients stop following them home, and that the drafting they turn to next goes faster and cleaner than it did when the consultation was still running in the background.

For a firm, the interval between consultations is a diary decision rather than a personal one. A department that books high-emotion consultations back to back has decided, without meaning to, that its practitioners will carry each client into the next, and it will see the cost in errors, in temper and in turnover.

PMRI teaches this in its time at the firm, shaped as a morning, a full day or two days, and in the Stress and Burnout Reset for Legal Professionals, a seasonal recorded session in which the consulting room is one of the worked examples. For a family law or litigation department it is often the session people ask for first, and the material is developed jointly by a behavioural specialist and an advocate with 27 years in practice, who has held a good many of these rooms herself. For in-house teams, the corporate legal training covers the same mechanism in the boardroom rather than the consulting room. If you would like to talk about what this would look like in your practice, start a conversation with us. The first conversation is without charge.