Your Clients Don’t Owe You Their Trust: A Conversation With Esther Perel

Esther Perel has spent decades listening to the way people talk about the people closest to them. At ClioCon 2025 she did the same thing to a room full of lawyers, and what she noticed were the verbs.

Convince. Destroy. Crush. Win. Defend.

“That is such an aggressive language for a profession where people set out to help,” she told us backstage after her keynote. And the verbs, she added, get used without anyone noticing they’ve chosen them.

We sat down with Perel to talk about the language of a gladiator profession, why the corporate world stopped filing relational skills under “soft,” the peer groups lawyers don’t have and badly need, what a client’s trust is actually built out of, and the AI version of her that a patient made because she wasn’t available.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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You’ve spent your career in couples therapy. What made a legal audience worth speaking to?

Esther Perel: I like to be in new spaces, and I like that more and more spaces understand the importance of talking about relationships. If you’re going to talk about AI, you have to talk about its effect on relationships. So I find myself talking to a lot of industries I’ve never had much contact with, and they’re all relational practices.

Law is a relational practice. The kind of law these people do, they’re working with clients. They’re trying to help, they’re trying to represent, they’re entering into the most private parts of these people’s lives. Not that different from us.

I’d never thought about the similarities until last night. And I’m thinking, wow, this is actually interesting. But it’s not a given to them. How do I translate that to them? How do I bring a relational perspective to what they do that isn’t just a legal perspective?

 

This year’s ClioCon theme was “Uniting Brilliance.” What gets in the way of lawyers uniting?

Esther Perel: I listened to the verbs: convince, destroy, crush, win, defend. And I thought, wow, that is such an aggressive language for a profession where people set out to help. You don’t help people with that kind of aggression only. Sometimes you have to be able to muster it. But it’s a very interesting choice of verbs, and they’re used without people having any idea.

It’s like when I work with marketing people and all they want to talk about is targets. Or therapists, who always want to talk about patients, meaning people who are sick. Maybe they’re not sick.

The story shapes the experience. When the story involves all these aggressive verbs, it shapes an experience that prevents uniting. There is nothing unifying in that language. Changing the language itself begins to change the position, the stance, the role people assign to themselves, the meaning they give to what it means to be a lawyer. If you’re not there to destroy the opposing counsel, then what replaces it? How do you practice law that isn’t a gladiator sport?

 

Does that mean lawyers need to be more empathetic?

Esther Perel: Or respectful. You don’t have to be empathetic. The other side of gladiator is not necessarily empathy. There are sports that are competitive without being aggressive.

 

You moved from the therapy room into corporate work. How did that shift feel?

Esther Perel: I spent 30 years working without being known, but doing this work. I worked with nonprofits, with co-founders, executive directors, and presidents of very large organizations. I didn’t go into the corporate world as much, but I was in the work world.

What really changed is not me. What changed is the corporate world. Until recently it saw relational intelligence as a soft skill. And a soft skill meant a feminine skill, which means you admire it in principle but you disregard it in reality. What has changed is that the corporate world has understood that relational intelligence is, in fact, the cutting edge. It is the bottom line. The thing that is going to distinguish one company from another is how it knows to deal with people. They shifted, and suddenly I became somebody they wanted in their midst. I don’t know that I shifted that much.

The other change is that capitalism has entered romantic life. The apps, romantic consumerism, hedging your bets, a transactional mentality. And psychological language has entered the business world. We talk about psychological safety and performance indicators in the same breath. Vulnerability, transparency, terms that never had anything to do with the corporate world. So psychology enters the corporate world and business enters the private world. There’s a parallel revolution taking place.

Both used to be production economies. Work was a production economy, you worked the land. Marriage was a production economy. Then both became service economies. Work became consultants and knowledge, and marriage became about affection and trust. Now both have become identity economies. You expect your relationships to help you become the best version of yourself, and you expect your job to give you meaning, community, continuity, belonging—the things that used to come with religion and communal structures. Both work and home have become identity projects.

 

Where does trust between a lawyer and a client actually come from?

Esther Perel: Through consistency and small behaviors, not huge gestures. And through evaluation. Ask your clients how this is landing for them. How is the process going? Is there something you should be paying more attention to that you haven’t? Check with them. Don’t present yourself like you’re the expert who knows it all. Understand that this is a relationship that you co-create.

Trust is not a given. It’s not something your clients owe you. You don’t start with trust. You start with getting to know a person, and over time, as you respond to them, they learn to trust you. And then they’ll give you everything they have.

We’re both in the confidentiality profession. People will give you everything if you’re the lawyer they’ve entrusted with that entire dimension of their life. It’s huge. But you earn that trust.

The question is, “How is this working for you?” It’s an evaluation question. To me it’s so obvious that I’m worried none of these lawyers do it.

 

Lawyers sit with emotionally charged and traumatic material over and over. How do they keep carrying it?

Esther Perel: They need small groups. You need a YPO type of thing for lawyers, where eight people come together every month, spend three or four hours together, and pour it out on each other. We call it peer supervision. You need collegial groups of people. You can find eight lawyers who do a different kind of law than you and you’ll have that group. I think it’s vital.

The fact that the profession hasn’t thought about that is because it’s so competitive. It’s me against you. The idea that you could help me on something, or that I could find relief in telling you I’m dealing with a case like this.

Boundaries are not where it’s at. Sometimes you think you have boundaries. I have patients who go under my skin, either because of something they do or because I’m so moved by it. When a person is in crisis, they call me every day if need be. Yes, you want to make sure you take care of yourself and do the basics, which I’m sure everybody has heard. But what you want first is somebody else who has seen cases like yours and says, “I’ve been there. I’ve had that case too. Here’s what I found helpful. Have you inquired about that?” So that you don’t feel like, my God, I’ve got somebody’s entire life in my hands.

It’s solidarity, it’s collegiality, it’s the expertise of people who are 10 years ahead of you. It needs to be intergenerational as well. You have people of all ages here. You’re not making use of it enough.

 

What actually happens in your groups?

Esther Perel: All of it. You present your challenges and your cases. You get to ask questions about the finances. About who you should and shouldn’t work with, or whether you should keep working with someone or tell them to go see somebody else. About people who haven’t paid you. We cover the ground from the business of the therapeutic practice, to the teaching of it, to clinical issues on specific cases.

Sometimes I bring in a colleague who has more experience with something for one conversation, and I just ask for their input with the patient there. That’s something lawyers could do. I’m dealing with this, it’s really complicated, and I need some fresh thinking. I need somebody outside. Especially when you’re in solo practice. It’s not like you have five other lawyers to go talk to. So you need to create these supports.

 

Someone who couldn’t get an appointment with you built an AI version of you instead. What did that teach you?

Esther Perel: That’s true. But while thinking about this I realized that the biggest shift is not what’s happening between us and the machines. The biggest shift is how we are transposing our expectations of our relationship with the machines onto our relationships with people. We expect predictability, perfection, and frictionlessness.

 

What’s the one relational skill a firm leader should be building right now?

Esther Perel: We are going through a major transition, and it’s bringing up all kinds of feelings in us. Some of us are welcoming the changes and the innovations and whatever is happening around AI, and some of us are a little more freaked out. It may have something to do with generations, but not all of it. And we don’t really know where this is taking us.

So the first thing you do is stick together. Nobody here has the answers, so we’re going to provide a space where we can all generate thoughts, questions, answers and reactions without them becoming so massive that we can’t work.

That’s what the best leaders did during the pandemic. They created a holding environment. They acknowledged what was happening to everyone. They didn’t pretend it wasn’t happening to them, or say, “We’re going to sail through this and come out stronger than ever before.” You create structure, you create clarity, you create containment, and you create a place where people can express the pros and cons of what they’re going through. And you prevent polarization. Whenever rapid change comes over a community or a profession, people first band together, and then they fracture. They turn on each other. A good leader will actually prevent that.

When things go well, we are less anxious, but we are less inclined to adapt and change, because why bother? When things don’t go well, we are more in need of change, but we are more anxious and less creative in imagining the change.

And it needs to be sustained, not one day a year at a conference. Ongoing, containing, clarifying, soothing, so that people can continue to work. Because if they get too involved with what’s happening, they can’t produce, they can’t perform. You don’t need a container because it’s nice and it feels good and it provides empathy. You contain it so that people can show up and do what they need to do.

 

Takeaway: “How is this working for you?”

Most of what Perel prescribes takes structure and time. Peer groups that meet every month. Leaders who build a container instead of a pep talk. A whole professional vocabulary traded in for one that didn’t come out of an arena.

One item on her list costs nothing. Ask the client how the process is going, and whether there’s something you’ve missed. Her worry, sitting backstage after speaking to a few thousand legal professionals, wasn’t that anyone would argue with her. It was that a question this obvious is one nobody asks.

Esther Perel presented her keynote at ClioCon 2025. To hear from the legal professionals, innovators, and advocates shaping the future of law, get your tickets to ClioCon 2026 today.