Antoine Henry de Frahan (EDHEC): "Mastering the art of conversation is critical for lawyers and professionals in general"

In September 2026, Antoine Henry de Frahan, Affiliate Professor at EDHEC Business School, taught a new course, “The Art of Conversation”, to students in the LL.M. in Law & Tax Management (1), a programme co-directed by Pr. Christophe Collard and Pr. Christophe Roquilly. An international consultant to law firms and legal departments, Antoine Henry de Frahan has worked on human skills development for lawyers for more than 25 years.
 

For several years, you have taught legal risk management, strategy for law firms and legal departments, business partnering, and value creation by lawyers. Why a course on the art of conversation now?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: The subjects you have mentioned reflect my daily work with law firms and legal departments, and they mean a lot to their leaders. But to students in their early twenties, these questions seem distant and abstract. At the earliest, they will face them in ten to fifteen years. Many students will build careers far from traditional legal paths and never face them. So, I wanted to teach something highly relevant to the curriculum, but also immediately and practically interesting to students. 

The question had been on my mind for years. Then, reading Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves (2), by Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks, was the trigger. It made me want to bring together much of what I had developed over 25 years on interpersonal skills, drawing on systemic thinking, communication theory, cognitive psychology, personal development, and philosophy.

An unusual subject for this kind of programme. Did you have to advocate for it?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Not at all. I submitted the idea to Professor Collard, and he supported it straight away. Frankly, it is a no-brainer: mastering the art of conversation is critical for lawyers and professionals in general. It starts with the hiring interview and the annual performance review: these are conversations. And then you have high-stakes negotiations, executive committee meetings, conflict resolution, informal conversations with colleagues: conversations are at the core of high-level professional life. 

How did the students react?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: They showed real interest. There is no exam for this course, so I told them at the outset that if they were not interested, they might as well not attend, with no consequences. However, if they decided to stay, I expected them to show commitment by arriving right on time (zero tolerance for “quart d’heure académique”) and participating in the exercises. And to start, I set a no-screen rule: PCs and smartphones off the tables and in their bags. They all played by the rules and stayed until the end.

Everyone now says human skills will make the difference in the age of AI. Isn't that becoming a cliché?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: You are right. You can read this everywhere (3). You may call it a cliché, but so far, it remains a safe assumption. Of course, strong human skills will not compensate for a lack of AI-related technical skills or solid legal knowledge, but successful lawyers will combine all three. There is no question that human skills will matter for lawyers to keep creating value. The real question is how to teach them.

So, how do you teach conversation skills, since conversation is something everyone already does?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: You raise a very interesting issue that questions the essence of learning and teaching. A student who takes a course on international tax law usually knows nothing about it; everything is new. Conversations are different; We have all had thousands of them, from trivial exchanges to intimate ones. But for most of us, that experience has become implicit competence: a set of skills we have acquired over time in learning by doing mode, without reflecting on them. 

The whole point of my course is to make that latent knowledge explicit. I don’t teach students something they don’t know. I help them become more conscious of what they already felt or kind of knew but had not formalised yet. I give words and models to name and make sense of familiar experiences. It enables students to reflect differently, more deeply, on their experiences. Once knowledge becomes explicit, you can perceive what is happening in real time during a conversation more accurately and choose more deliberately how to influence it.

This teaching philosophy is inspired by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (4). They explain that adult learning is less about adding new skills to our repertoire of behaviours than about becoming able to look at our own mental frameworks and transform them. If we are not aware of them, our conversation patterns determine how we engage in conversations; once we start observing and questioning our patterns, we become increasingly capable of changing our behaviour. This is true not just for conversation skills, it is true for all human skills.

But if we over-manage conversations, isn’t there a risk of losing spontaneity or becoming manipulative? Aren’t conversations better if we don’t try to “manage” them?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Let’s not be too romantic about spontaneity. We have all been trapped in a boring, useless, endless conversation. Understanding what makes a conversation boring, awkward or stressful, and which techniques can make it more enjoyable or interesting, and using these techniques: Where is the problem? 

Of course, anything can be misused; that depends on intention, and the ethics of conversation is a subject in itself. But believing that what comes spontaneously is necessarily better than what comes from deliberate design is a mistake. The best example is a meeting: If everyone expresses themselves spontaneously, chaos is guaranteed. You need someone to steer the process. Acting deliberately on the dynamic of a conversation is a service to yourself and to others.

Can we link this to the problem of the distribution of power in a conversation?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: You touch here on a fundamental point. There is often an explicit or implicit hierarchy between the conversation partners. If you have the higher status in the group, you speak more than the others, they look at you, listen to you, and laugh at your jokes. If you have low status in the group, the others ignore you and you feel like a nobody. In such situations, the art of conversation consists in balancing everyone’s status. If you are on the high, elevate the others’s status by asking them questions, looking at them, leaving them space to talk, and showing interest. Believe me, they will be grateful! And if you are on the low end, that’s tricky: you have to avoid the pitfall of falling even lower and instead elevate your own status in the conversation. 

What are the key ideas students should still remember in ten years?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: You should ask the students. Different things resonate with different people. I am very happy if they take away anything and internalise it. To help them, I use metaphors. For example, I compare a conversation to football: In a good conversation, like a good football match, the ball circulates; players don’t keep it for too long; they keep passing it to others. In your conversations, how do you involve others? Do you pass them the ball? Do you notice when you or others are keeping the ball for too long, and how do you inject more fluidity? 

A friend of mine has a reputation for being a great conversationalist because he can speak in a very articulate manner and endlessly on many subjects. He keeps the ball for himself. He is good at monologues, but terrible at conversation. We often presume that a good communicator is a good producer of content. We forget a basic truth: good communication is a two-way street, talking and listening. And the bridge between both is the art of asking questions. So, ultimately, being a great conversationalist has a lot to do with asking questions.

You insist the course is practical. What happens in the classroom?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: The course is based on exercises. Students pair up, and I give them a theme and precise instructions. In one exercise, they may only ask questions for several minutes. Starting with something as simple as summer holidays, the conversation partner keeps asking questions that go deeper and deeper. You quickly reach things that are profound and genuinely important to the person.

Only asking questions sounds a bit artificial and uncomfortable…

Antoine Henry de Frahan: It is meant to be. Most of us stay in a safe relational frame where we take no risk and therefore get nothing from the conversation. Here, students open up but in a completely safe setting. Awkwardness is a sign that you are testing new territory. That’s good! Nobody is judged; We are all in the same boat. And, of course, everything shared is strictly confidential: Students may talk to anyone about what they learned about conversations, never about what a classmate said. 

You argue that we often confuse communication with monologue. What do you mean?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Lawyers are a telling example, though the problem is not theirs alone. For lawyers, the archetype of communication is pleading. That is not a conversation; it is a monologue designed to convince and to discredit the other side. In the courtroom, two monologues compete, but that never produces a solution because each side is locked into its own mental framework. This is why we need a judge to make the decision. 

A conversation is different: Parties alternate speaking and listening, ask questions, and try to understand the other's point of view. That’s the process you see at work in mediation, a very promising mode of conflict resolution.

Many readers of this interview have years of professional experience. Should it matter to them as well?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Mastering the art of conversation isn’t about how much practice you have had. What makes the difference is your capacity for real-time reflection on how you take part in a conversation and steer it deliberately. That does not come automatically with age. You may be 60, have a vast experience of conversation, and still be unaware of your own conversational patterns, however well-oiled they may be. 

One tip to try on Monday morning?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Something very simple. Pay attention to how much interest the other person shows when you speak to them. Do they ask questions, follow up, bring you back to the subject? If they don’t, they are probably not interested, and it is time to change the subject. We have all been bored by someone talking endlessly about something that does not interest us. This is how you avoid becoming that person. By the way, this would be a challenging test for professors: If they stop talking about the course topic, will students start asking questions to hear more? I am not sure I want to try!

What did you learn from teaching it for the first time?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: It is well known that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Preparing and giving this course has sharpened my own sensitivity to conversations, and I now use these skills more intentionally in my daily conversations. 

A final word?

Antoine Henry de Frahan: Learning about the art of conversation has obvious benefits for one’s personal and professional life. But there is also a political dimension to it. Look at today's polarised political debate: competing monologues aiming to disqualify the other side. That’s the exact opposite of a conversation. The fundamental idea of democracy is that societal issues should and can be talked through. That is what a parliament is supposed to be: a place where people have conversations about important matters. Even when people disagree or have diverging interests, real and productive conversations remain possible. As I see it, the capacity and willingness to have open, engaged conversations are essential to democracy. 
 

References

(1) LL.M. in Law & Tax Management, EDHEC - https://www.edhec.edu/fr/programmes/masters-msc/business-management/llm-in-law-and-tax-management

(2) Brooks, Alison Wood. Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Crown, 2025 - https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=66864

(3) See for example Natalie Runyon, Rethinking lawyer development in future AI enabled law firms, Thomson Reuters Institute, April 16, 2026,  https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/institute/articles/lawyer-development-ai-enabled-law-firms; Nicolás Parra-Herrera, Reimagining Innovation in Law: Emphasizing Interpersonal Skills, Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, November 6, 2025, https://clp.law.harvard.edu/knowledge-hub/insights/reimagining-innovation-in-law-emphasizing-interpersonal-skills/; Jordan Furlong, The rise of the “human skills” lawyer, June 14, 2023, https://jordanfurlong.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-human-skills-lawyer.

(4) Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, Harvard Business Review Press, 2009 - https://store.hbr.org/product/immunity-to-change-how-to-overcome-it-and-unlock-the-potential-in-yourself-and-your-organization/1736?srsltid=AU7gw4VEcfjvIjqUB8mFs_5fXdAtp1oMJib1eFMqmwqpXIoPsBSHmNDq