Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
A client is sitting across the desk crying. Perhaps they have just described years of domestic violence. Perhaps he has lost a case that consumed half a decade. Perhaps a witness is about to walk into court and recount the worst experience of their life, or a defendant has finally understood what is at stake. What do you do? writes Rebecca Ward, MBA.
There is the safe option: slide the tissue box across the desk, lower your voice, and give them time. Or you could reach across and touch their hand. You might even give them a hug. Suddenly, something as ordinary and instinctively human as comforting another person becomes surprisingly complicated.
The healing power of touch
Humans touch one another for reasons that long predate professional conduct rules. We shake hands, embrace friends, put an arm around someone who is grieving, and touch a shoulder to communicate reassurance when words seem inadequate. Touch can convey warmth, affiliation, safety, and connection in ways that language sometimes cannot.
There is also a physiological basis for some of this. A large 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examining 137 studies found that touch interventions were associated with improvements across a range of physical and psychological outcomes, including reductions in pain, anxiety, depression, and cortisol. Effects on cardiovascular measures such as blood pressure were also observed, although the size and consistency of benefits varied considerably depending on the type of touch, the person providing it, and the outcome being measured.
None of this means that a solicitor should prescribe three hugs daily with meals. It does mean that touch is not merely sentimental. Our bodies participate in how we experience distress, and a person can tell you they are fine while their breathing, posture, trembling hands and entire nervous system suggest otherwise.
Legal practitioners know this intuitively because they spend their careers reading people: clients, witnesses, opponents, jurors, and sometimes each other. A person who feels safe and supported may be better able to speak, listen, and process what is happening around them. Yet there is an obvious complication: touch can comfort, but touch can also be the thing from which someone needs comforting.
When the same gesture means something different
Consider a client who has experienced sexual or domestic violence. He or she is crying while providing instructions, and her solicitor, who has represented them for months, wants to reassure her. Would a hand on the arm communicate, ‘You are safe here’? Possibly. Would unexpected physical contact recreate a loss of bodily control at precisely the wrong moment? Also, possibly.
What if the solicitor asks first, ‘Would you like a hug?’ That appears to solve the problem neatly because the client retains control and can simply say no. Except even that is not quite so simple. Would someone who has recently been assaulted want the question raised at all? Does a vulnerable client feel completely free to refuse an offer made by the professional on whom they are relying?
The same person may answer differently six months later or two years later, particularly when court finally arrives and the events must be recounted again. There is no universal traumatised client, just as there is no universal response to touch. Culture matters. Personal history matters. Gender may matter. Age may matter. The nature and duration of the professional relationship matter, and whether the client initiated the contact matters.
Context changes meaning.
Consent helps, but it does not answer everything
Psychotherapists have wrestled with these questions for decades because therapeutic relationships combine intimacy, disclosure, vulnerability and professional power. One useful distinction in that literature is between a boundary crossing and a boundary violation. The concepts are not interchangeable. Some non-sexual boundary crossings can be benign or even therapeutically useful, while a violation exploits or harms the person in the professional relationship.
This is why many clinicians who contemplate physical contact use explicit consent. Would you like a hug? Is it OK if I touch your arm? There is considerable wisdom in restoring choice to the person whose body is involved, particularly where trauma, uncertainty, or vulnerability exists.
Lawyers, however, occupy a different professional relationship. Their clients have not necessarily entered the room expecting therapeutic care, even though they may disclose extraordinarily intimate details about marriage, childhood, finances, sexuality, addiction, violence, or alleged offending. The relationship can therefore become emotionally close while remaining professionally distinct.
Consent helps considerably, but it cannot turn every form of touch into appropriate professional conduct merely because somebody said yes. Power, dependence, context, and judgement do not disappear at the moment consent is given. Nor can it interpret meaning/understanding?
Then, there is the law
It is also important not to collapse every physical interaction into sexual harassment. Under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth), sexual harassment involves an unwelcome sexual advance, an unwelcome request for sexual favours, or other unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature in circumstances where a reasonable person would have anticipated the possibility of offence, humiliation, or intimidation. The legislation expressly requires consideration of the circumstances, including the relationship between the people involved.
The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules likewise prohibit discrimination, sexual harassment, and workplace bullying in connection with legal practice. The professional framework is therefore broader than conduct occurring behind a closed office door, but it remains contextual rather than reducing every physical interaction to a binary question of whether contact occurred.
A congratulatory hug between two colleagues who have worked side by side through a six-month trial is not automatically equivalent to a senior practitioner embracing a graduate who does not want to be touched. A longstanding solicitor embracing a client after the conclusion of years of litigation is not necessarily equivalent to unexpected physical contact during a first conference.
The physical movement may look similar. The relationship, power, expectation, and meaning may be entirely different.
The risk of solving uncertainty by never touching
Faced with that complexity, there is an obvious risk-management response: do not touch anyone (and then there’s also life post-COVID-19). From one perspective, that is wonderfully simple. There is no ambiguity, no misread signal, and no question afterwards about whether the contact was welcome.
Professional distance, however, is not necessarily psychologically neutral. Imagine again the client crying across the desk. The practitioner remains safely behind it, slides the tissues across the polished timber and says, “I am very sorry you are going through this.”
For some clients, that is exactly the right response. Space may itself communicate respect. For others, particularly after a relationship has developed over years, the deliberate absence of ordinary human warmth may feel strangely clinical.
We routinely tell professionals to be empathetic, trauma-informed, and human. At the same time, we increasingly warn them about physical boundaries, power imbalances and the possibility that an apparently innocent gesture will be experienced differently from how it was intended. Both concerns are legitimate, and the difficulty is holding them simultaneously.
When comfort has four legs
Perhaps one of the more interesting developments is occurring inside the courts themselves. In October 2025, the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia introduced court dog Leo to its Brisbane registry as part of the National Court Dog Program, which is intended to reduce stress and provide support to children and vulnerable litigants during court proceedings.
There is something revealing in that development. At the same time that humans have become increasingly cautious about professional touch, institutions have found another source of physical proximity and non-verbal reassurance. A court dog does not carry quite the same ambiguity of hierarchy, sexuality, or professional intention, and the person can approach, pat the animal, sit beside it, or leave it alone.
Therapy and court dogs are an adjunct, not an answer to the broader question of how human professionals relate to distressed human beings. Most clients will never have a labrador conveniently available beside counsel’s table, and the central problem remains the same.
The hardest cases
The difficult questions occur precisely where no policy can decide them comfortably. A family-law client has disclosed sexual assault and begins crying. Do you ask whether she wants a hug, or would even asking introduce physical contact into a moment when she needs control of her own space?
A criminal defendant is shaking before sentencing. Would putting a hand on their shoulder ground him, or cross a professional boundary? A witness whom you have prepared for months walks out of court after giving difficult evidence and spontaneously embraces you. Do you reciprocate? Do you say I don’t touch clients? Or how about a handshake instead?
A junior solicitor receives devastating personal news at work. Does the answer change because the person offering comfort is a colleague? What if it is their supervising partner? And what happens when the same people meet outside the office?
Humans do not divide themselves neatly into professional and non-professional nervous systems at the lift doors. Professional relationships, however, do not disappear simply because everyone has moved to the pub.
To hug or not to hug? Living in the world of consent
Perhaps the mistake is looking for a universal rule. “Always ask first” has much to recommend it, particularly where trauma, vulnerability, or uncertainty exists, but consent does not remove every issue of power or professional judgement. “Never touch clients” provides clarity, but may turn sensible boundaries into emotional sterility.
“Use common sense” sounds appealing until we remember that one person’s completely ordinary hug is another person’s invasion of space. “Read the room” assumes we are considerably better at reading other people than psychology suggests we are.
Perhaps the safer principle is simply not to assume. Do not assume that someone wants to be touched because they are distressed. Do not assume that physical distance is harmless merely because it is professionally safe. Do not assume that the gesture that comforted one client will comfort another, and do not assume that because an act is intended kindly, it will necessarily be experienced that way.
A client is crying across the desk. The tissues are within reach, and so is their hand. What do you do?
Rebecca Ward is an MBA-qualified management consultant with a focus on mental health. She is the managing director of Barristers’ Health, which supports the legal profession through management consulting and psychotherapy. Barristers’ Health was founded in memory of her brother, Steven Ward, LLB.
