Lots if not most of these cases my firm defends waste money, time and resources; they clog up the court system, they are all about the lawyers, and they make business clients (especially non-Americans) think lawyers, judges and the American court system is uncaring, anti-business, self-indulgent, inefficient and flat-out nuts. Lawyers keeping the client in the dark is much to blame.
A premise of this blog (see our first post in 2005) is that lawyers regularly lie to their clients. They lie to even great clients. WAC? believes that the practice of law generally has become disturbingly and cavalierly “lawyer-oriented”, rather than “about clients”. We think that, increasingly, sophisticated clients, who are often just as savvy if not more savvy about their cases and deals than the lawyers who serve them, have become the equipment in an expensive and wasteful game played by lawyers.
Rather than the word “lie”, we could use the more PC or subtle expressions of fudge the truth, fail to disclose or obfuscate. But why use softer terms? Fact: we lawyers have some of the strongest legal, fiduciary and professional duties–in common law, statute and public policy–not only to tell our clients the truth but go out of our way to explain to clients actual events as they happen and what we really think about merits of litigation or transaction on a real-time and ongoing basis. My threshold question is that if I think my client or its general counsel would want to know about an event, or even know merely what I am thinking about (from “good” to “bad” observations and analysis of a project’s turns and progress), I tell them. If I don’t tell a client what happens and what I think about it, I am lying. It’s a hard standard, but it is ours as lawyers.
What do lawyers hide from their clients or lie about? In litigation, it’s 4 main things: (1) day-to-day developments which are “bad”, not perfect or the client just might not really want to hear (call them