I know one personally. She’s a terrible lawyer. She can’t read and understand a court opinion. She misreads statutes. She’s an embarrassment in court. Her pleadings are poorly drafted. Her correspondence is filled with errors. She says things in chambers that make her look like an idiot. Her objections are overruled. Her court appearances are dominated by illogical arguments.
She’s a really crappy lawyer.
Her clients, however, love her. They refer business to her like crazy. She spends nearly nothing on marketing and is making a freaking fortune. She can’t see a new client for weeks because she is solidly booked.
How is it that she is such a bad lawyer yet is so successful?
Here’s the deal. She does things that make it clear that she cares about her clients. She rants and raves in court, like a maniac, on behalf of her clients. She crosses over every line and gets personally involved with her clients. She laughs with her clients, she cries with her clients. She returns calls, she calls at night, she stays on the phone forever. She loves her clients and it shows. She knows it and her clients know it. She’d do anything to help them. They are her friends.
Her clients love her. They love her when she wins, they love her when she loses. They know she’s committed to their cause. They know she did her best, even when her best isn’t good enough.
It all makes me wonder whether she’s really a crappy lawyer or whether I have ideas about what’s important that might be irrelevant. Who sets the standard for crappy? Lawyers or clients? Maybe my idea of crappy doesn’t really matter?
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Lee Rosen has practiced family law for more than twenty years. With three offices, 
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Interesting post Lee. It raises the question of how much of a lawyer’s job is getting the client a favorable outcome from the legal system and how much is keeping the client happy. When a client wants to explain to the Judge all the reasons the marriage failed, and you know from experience that such an approach is immaterial and could potentially even hurt their case, what do you do? How much of your role is as an objective advisor and how much is as a subjective advocate or personal legal tool?
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Great questions. I’d love to know the answers.
For lots of us I think it comes down to whether we want to be respected by our peers or our clients. Most lawyers, I think, worry more about peers. We explain that we’ll have to deal with them forever and clients come and go.
In an ideal world we’d do the job well enough to gain the respect of both. I know you’re doing the work day in and day out and you know it’s tough to meet that standard.
Lee
Why Do Some Crappy Divorce Lawyers Have Happy Clients? http://ow.ly/1fADh
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Why Do Some Crappy Lawyers Have Happy Clients?http://divorcediscourse.com/2010/03/08/crappy-lawyers-happy-clients/
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Lee,
Excellent post. I’ve seen exactly what you’re talking about. The balance between subjective advisor and zealous advocate is always a challenging one.
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Kimberly,
Thanks for your kind words. I appreciate your input.
Lee
I think that you can be both, especially when your clients love you. Most of my clients like me because I provide excellent service. I take the time to explain legal points at length and respond to emails and try where ever possible to take my clients’ views into account. Because I do all of that, when it’s time to toe the line – for example, to reject a requested way of doing things because it’s unethical or will unnecessarily aggravate opposing counsel – they listen to me. Just as I tell my daughters (who love me), I am supposed to be a parent, not a friend. So too with clients – we are advocates and counsel, not their friends. I’ve blogged before about what happens when you get too close to clients to the point of being an irresponsible advocate: http://www.myshingle.com/2006/04/articles/client-relations/clients-as-pals-almost-as-bad-as-the-client-from-hell/
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Carolyn,
I love your post. Thanks for linking to it and for advancing the conversation.
Lee
Why Do Some Crappy Lawyers Have Happy Clients? – http://divorcediscourse.com/2010/03/08/crappy-lawyers-happy-clients/
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“(I want to hear from Dan Hull on this. If the practice of law is all about clients, if the client is the main event, isn’t the crappy lawyer with ecstatic clients doing her job?)”
Answer: No. Clients are the “main event”, sure–but only very good to great clients are even addressed by our blog. My 2 cents dumb downed a little.
Client service is NEVER about:
1. Being nice to clients, even to smart ones.
2. Making them happy if they are clueless or unsophisticated.
It’s a bit narrow, I know, but What About Clients/Paris? IS about the art of making corporate clients safe (competence) and happy (they come back to you even though they have choices).
Both the lawyers and clients in the criminal defense–I have done more of it than most corporate lawyers so I get some things–are in a different universe. More important rights and considerations are involved, including court appointed gigs. It is a higher art form; lawyer competence is always important and client “happiness” may not be so important.
Just to be honest and clear, my blog and my firm are not interested in “most” clients. Most clients–individuals or companies–are a miserable pain in the ass and are beneath everyone reading this.
Life is too short. We like non-wanker and non-chickenshit GCs who work for good companies that know where they are headed. Everyone else? We hope they make it. But don’t call us. We work to hard.
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Though your being right this time makes me sad, the American culture’s Code for lawyers most certainly is CHEATERS. As in, “cheating on my behalf so I get away with something for which I deserve to be punished or get something good I don’t otherwise deserve” = good, “cheating on the other guy’s behalf so he gets away with something for which he deserves to be punished or gets something good he doesn’t otherwise deserve” = bad. And remember, anything that occurs in court that results in the unjust, wrong-from-my-perspective outcome must be the result of cheating, since otherwise, the courts would produce nothing but pure, unadulterated justice flowing like milk and tasting like honey. These cultural perspective result in a society that simultaneously reviles attorneys at every opportunity, and yet hires them at every turn.
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