At The Law Office of Scott R. Herndon, strategically located in Berkeley, California, we understand that seeking legal help for a sexual assault or catastrophic personal injury is an intensely personal and daunting step. Serving survivors across the entire state, including the Bay Area, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego, our firm distinguishes itself through rigorous human-centered advocacy and philosophy. This page is intended to inform survivors and future clients of our particular philosophy and practice of client relations, which has been developed from years of academic work and trial advocacy in major sexual assault and personal injury cases. Discover how our commitment to genuine human connection, informed by leading psychological research, ensures you receive the compassionate, knowledgeable advocacy you deserve.
One of the most challenging obstacles that a survivor of a high-profile sexual assault (or serious personal injury) faces is the initial phone call with a law firm. It takes courage to call a law firm, wait on hold, and speak with an intake coordinator (who is often not an attorney, and reads from a list of basic questions). During this process, the survivor knows that this is only the first step in her journey into repeatedly reliving the worst, most harrowing experience of her life. These strangers may judge her. She may feel shame, alienation, self-loathing, and fear of retribution and further pain from the powerful people or corporations which have hurt her or her family in the first place. These emotional valences are common among survivors, and well-described in recent psychological research (See for instance, Hood et al, 2020; Kovac et al, 2025).
Imagine the survivor’s relief when her first call is answered by the principal of the law firm, and not a secretary. Because this initial conversation is with an experienced trial lawyer, the conversation is allowed to take unexpected turns, with breaks in dialogue and pauses when the subject of what happened or who did this to you is too difficult to recount. The lawyer may understand that the conversation should be moved to an in-person meeting, or a Zoom call. The survivor’s trust to tell her story must be earned. This is the PhD trial lawyer Scott Herndon’s practice.
Distress tolerance is a concept used in psychology to describe our capacity to experience and withstand negative mental states, or our ability to persist in goal-oriented behavior when experiencing emotional distress (Garner & Kleiman, 2025; Kovac et al, 2025). In the context of a survivor calling a law firm about a sexual assault or catastrophic personal injury, this distress can include intense emotions of fear, anxiety, shame, and even physical discomfort. People have difference levels of tolerance for emotional distress, just as they have different tolerances for pain.
Distress tolerance has also been linked to affective forecasting, or a person’s expectation of the nature, intensity, duration and impact of her feelings in the near future (Garner & Kleiman, 2025). Though we may not often use this phrase in our daily lives, we all know how affective forecasting works in our lives.
How many of us have cancelled dental appointments, due to our fear of the dentist’s needles, drills, and tooth polish? We expect the worst, and we anticipate it, and this may cause some of us to avoid even going to the dentist at all. Here, the person who avoids the dentist might be said to have a low distress tolerance. The person who has the stomach to endure her fear of the dental office and get her teeth cleaned may be said to have a high distress tolerance.
This dynamic has also been described colloquially and in the psychological literature as a self-fulfilling prophesy (Brown et al, 2022; Madon et al, 2011). This is when a set of beliefs (or affective forecasts) can lead to its own fulfillment.
Lawyers must ensure that the emotional charge of the intake call does not lapse into the survivor’s worst fears: that she may be judged, feel ashamed, or traumatized by the nature of the experience. Just as importantly, a lawyer’s own expectations of the call should not control the conversation and force it into another, equally problematic self-fulfilling prophesy—confirmation bias, or our unconscious tendency to search for, favor, and recall information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs (Wason, 1960). Perhaps the worst outcome of an intake call is when a client feels that all of her fears have been realized, and the lawyer also has failed to listen actively to cues which might unlock the key facts of the potential case.
Understood in this way, successful intake calls require a carefully constructed dance between the survivor and the lawyer, which preserves the survivor’s dignity and enables the lawyer to understand the facts of the potential case in its due time.
When meeting a survivor of sexual assault or serious personal injury for the first time, we must not only understand the causal background of the survivor’s injuries, we must understand the emotional background of the phone call or meeting itself. The survivor has lived this call in her mind—for days, weeks, years, and sometimes, even a lifetime. The lawyer must be prepared to welcome the survivor in a space that recognizes the obstacles that the survivor overcame simply to make the call.
The best lawyers understand that for certain survivors, low distress tolerance can (and often will) lead to conversations that twist and diverge as the survivor is asked to recount her experiences. These are emotionally charged, intense and taxing conversations. If not handled carefully and with empathy, the survivor may distrust the lawyer, or even herself. She may focus on certain aspects of her story simply to suppress her feelings, lead the lawyer away from the radioactive center of her story, and avoid discussing the emotional and physical truth of what happened to her. Lawyers may miss a crucial opportunity to understand and assess the nature of the case, or the person sitting before them.
Psychologists have found strong correlations between post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), low distress tolerance, and general negative affect (Hood et al, 2020). For lawyers, this means that intake conversations with survivors of sexual assault will likely be charged with PTSS, and appropriate and empathetic questioning and listening approaches must be used to respond to the their emotional landscape.
Survivors with high distress tolerance also present specific challenges, especially in contexts of trauma-related anger and PTSS and PTSD (Morabito et al, 2019). In this regard, psychologists have found that for survivors with both high and low distress tolerance, certain interlocutory settings (such as a laboratory or the conference room of a plaintiff’s law firm) can contribute to increased emotional reactions to trauma cues high in PTSS (Badour et al, 2011; Etkin & Wager, 2007; Morabito et al, 2020; Shin et al, 1999; Wolf et al, 2009). This dynamic is described by psychologist Danielle Morabito:
One possible explanation for this interaction may be that when traumatic event cues are presented in the laboratory they are experienced as relatively uncontrollable, because individuals in a controlled setting may perceive being relatively unable to escape or engage in behaviors that they would typically use to distract themselves from the traumatic event cues after instructed to vividly imagine them despite the fact the procedure could be discontinued. In other words, experimental demand characteristics likely resulted in the perception that trauma cues were relatively uncontrollable… (Morabito et al, 2020).
As a result, it is essential that lawyers understand the structural and psychological effects of their initial conversations with survivors. These conversations often lead to emotional instability, especially when lawyers press too hard on certain details, events, or subjects without first earning the survivor’s trust, or establishing a conversational space which does not present itself as pressurized, confrontational, or isolating.
Alternately, if we as lawyers do not pay careful attention to the emotional spaces of our intake conversations, we may misunderstand a survivor’s anger or emotional floridity as a red flag, an urge for revenge, or even exaggeration. But the better lawyers trained, the better they will recognize the survivor’s narrative instability may simply be a response to PTSS and a space for trust that has not yet been earned.
Initial conversations are not depositions or interrogations. They are a way of building an architecture to understand a future story with complex emotional consequences for all survivors. If there is one take home message here, it is that we, as lawyers, must have empathy and build spaces for these traumatic events to be described and experienced safely by survivors. We must know that the trust we earn in those initial conversations will result in the gradual and comprehensive understanding of the facts of the case—with care and over time.
The journey toward justice after a sexual assault or catastrophic personal injury requires more than just legal expertise; it demands a deep understanding of human experience, empathy and trust. At The Law Office of Scott R. Herndon in Berkeley, CA, we believe your first interaction with a law firm should be one of profound relief and genuine connection, not further distress. As a PhD trial lawyer, Scott Herndon personally answers your call, offering an immediate and compassionate engagement that sets the foundation for a truly collaborative and successful legal partnership. Serving clients from Oakland to Los Angeles, and across San Francisco to San Diego, our commitment to human-centered legal advocacy ensures that your emotional well-being is considered every step of the way. Contact us today to begin your journey with a legal team that prioritizes you.
