I did not grow up in Canada. I arrived as a new immigrant in my early thirties, the first person in my family to ever attend post-secondary education. By the time I walked into my first Canadian law school reception in my 3L due to the COVID era, I had absolutely no idea how to start a conversation with the person standing next to me holding a glass of sparkling water.
For years, my small talk was a series of polite catastrophes. I would stand in a corner rehearsing one safe sentence about the weather. I would smile too hard, laugh a beat too late, and miss every reference to a hockey team, a cottage in Muskoka, or a high school I had never heard of. I would walk away from receptions exhausted, convinced I had failed at something everyone else had quietly learned in childhood.
So I did what nerdy academics do when they cannot do something: I researched it. I read books, I listened to podcasts, and I quietly studied the lawyers and clients who seemed to make conversation look effortless. I am still learning. But I have picked up a few things along the way, and I am writing this in the hope that they may be useful to colleagues who, like me, were never handed the unwritten manual.
The most useful framework I have found comes from Professor Allison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School, who has spent her career studying conversation as a science. She organizes her work around a four-letter acronym, T.A.L.K. — Topics, Asking, Levity, and Kindness. As lawyers, I think we all benefit from looking at conversation through this lens.