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.
T is for Topics: Prepare for Conversations the Way You Prepare for a Hearing
Most of us would never walk into a courtroom, a mediation room or a first client meeting without preparation, yet we walk into receptions and galas without a single thought about what we are going to say.
Brooks's research found that spending just thirty seconds before a conversation brainstorming two or three potential topics dramatically reduces anxiety and makes the interaction more fluent. You may not even use the topics you prepare. The act of preparing is what calms the nervous system and primes the mind.
I have started doing this before every networking event and client meeting. Two minutes in the parking lot with my ChatGPT app: what is happening in immigration policy this week; what is happening in this person's practice area; what was the last thing we spoke about. It is a small habit, but it has made a measurable difference. I no longer have to rely on the weather.
A is for Asking: The Antidote to Egocentrism
Brooks describes human beings as naturally egocentric. We had to be, to survive. The problem is that egocentrism is the single biggest barrier to connection. The remedy is asking questions — real questions, and then follow-up questions.
Lawyers should be naturally good at this. We are trained to ask. Yet I notice that in social settings many of us do the opposite: we lecture, we credential, we explain. Brooks has a phrase for people who ask zero questions in a conversation. She calls them “ZQS”, Zero Question Senders, and she suggests that meeting one is a red flag for a long-term relationship. So do not be a ZQS.
I think about this when I meet senior lawyers at bar events, when I sit down with a potential mentor over coffee, when I am introduced to a more experienced counsel after a hearing. Am I asking, or am I performing? The temptation, especially as a newer lawyer, is to prove myself — to recite my credentials, to drop the right case names, to show that I belong in the room. The follow-up question is the superpower that does the opposite, and works far better. Tell me more. What happened next. How did you decide to handle it that way. Those small words that turn a conversation from a transaction into a relationship, and, more often than not, leave a senior lawyer remembering me as someone they enjoyed talking to.
L is for Levity: The Quiet Killer Is Boredom
Most lawyers worry about saying the wrong thing. Brooks suggests we should worry just as much about being boring. Boredom, she says, is a quieter but more common killer of connection than conflict.
Levity does not mean stand-up comedy. It means warmth, sparkle, a willingness to be a little playful. In my own practice, I have learned that even a refugee intake meeting can hold space for a small moment of lightness: a shared smile about my dog interrupting our Zoom, a kind comment about a child's drawing in the background. Those moments do not lessen the gravity of the work. They humanize it.
A note of caution from Brooks is worth flagging: self-deprecating humour works well for senior or high-status people, but it carries more risk for those who are junior, racialized, or otherwise still earning credibility. If you are a young woman lawyer in a room of senior litigators, calling yourself “just a baby lawyer” can make others quietly wonder whether you actually are competent. Choose levity that is warm rather than self-diminishing.
K is for Kindness: Conversation as an Act of Care
Kindness, in Brooks's framework, is the discipline of resisting our self-focus long enough to figure out what the other person actually needs. A hug. A coffee. A question. A pause.
For me, this matters in two directions. As a firm owner, I now have law students and junior lawyers reaching out to me for coffee, advice, and informational chats. I also still meet immigration and refugee clients on the worst days of their lives: a refused application, a missed deadline, a family member detained. In both rooms, the legal or career answer is only part of what they need. The other part is to feel seen. A kind word on the way out the door, an email that begins with "I am thinking about you," a few extra minutes for a question I could have brushed off, these are not extras. They are practice.
The harder lesson I am still learning is the other side of the equation. Not everyone in this profession will be kind back. Some senior lawyers will not return kindness. When that happens, my work is to shake it off and keep going — to refuse to let someone else's unkindness recalibrate my own. The kindness I extend is not a transaction. It is a standard I hold for myself, regardless of who is in the room.
A Word for the Other Outsiders in the Room
I want to say something directly to the lawyers who arrived in this country as adults, who are the first in their families to wear a robe, who still translate in their heads in the middle of conversations. I see you in the corner of every reception. I have stood there.
Cultural fluency is real, and it is not equally distributed. Many of us were never taught the choreography of Canadian small talk: the inflection, the safe topics, the moment to laugh, the way to exit a conversation without seeming rude. None of this came naturally to me, and some of it still does not. What changed for me was permission. Permission to study the skill openly, to practise it the way I practised case law, and to forgive myself for getting it wrong in the meantime.
If your small talk is awkward, it does not mean you do not belong. It means you are doing something hard, in your second or third language, in a room that did not necessarily build itself with you in mind. Please keep going. The profession is better when we are in it.
About the Author
Dr. Ningjing (Natalie) Zhang is the founder and principal lawyer of BridgePoint Law Professional Corporation (www.bridgepointlaw.ca), where she practises immigration and refugee law. She arrived in Canada in her early thirties as the first person in her family to pursue post-secondary education, and is now one of the few refugee-turned-lawyers in Canada.
This article was inspired by Mel Robbins’ interview with Professor Allison Brooks of Harvard Business School on the science of conversation on October 30, 2025 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yCqhY1D-VE), drawn from Allison Brooks’s book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves (New York: Crown Currency, 2025).
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