What can you do when virtually everyone can lose?
tl;dr — Forget about your reputation and just tell the truth.
Sometimes it isn’t obvious from the initial meetings that your client has misled you, since they probably believe what they are saying and their feelings may be easy to emphasize with. After all, empathizing part of the job, right?
Especially if you need the cash.
An Unspoken Known in Family Law is that attorneys end up stuck in less-than well-intentioned modifications because they need(ed) the money. But they probably didn’t see the full scope of the headache involved, because we legal professionals easily forget that we talk about family law like mechanics talk with each other about complex vehicle repairs. We forget that the client can hear almost none of the jargon, especially if that client is mired in permanent, bitter feelings.
The truth of disempowerment is hard to believe as a present reality. A loss of control over one’s life, a loss of control and time and opportunity to bond with one’s child – these are devastating life changes which are impossible to fully accept for some.
When those feelings are combined with some technically plausible reason to file a lawsuit, you have a recipe for disaster: a suit that can’t really lead to much in the way of meaningful changes, or even if it does and can and will, it very well may not be what the client really wanted from the beginning: retribution, revenge: to punish the other party; to use the child as a pawn.
It bears repeating that much of this unfolds subconsciously for both attorney and client. Few people routinely act on conscious malice.
You may be thinking: “yes I know all this, so what do I do?” Well, aside from taking care in avoiding cases like this, and aside from sending your client to therapy, do the unthinkable:
Forget about your reputation and tell the truth. Level with the client about their resentment. Get philosophical with them about the ultimate point of satisfied revenge. This will work better than you might think. Clients are better tuned to the believability of your words than the actual words themselves in the state that they are in, and they will detect a greater degree of sincerity than when you were explaining technical grounds for filing suit.
And here’s the scary part: tell the truth about your part in it: that you felt as they did and saw a path to vindication on the basis of those feelings, but the situation is now more clear, more complex, and nearly impossible to fix, because *the underlying feelings in these cases can never be litigated* to a resolution, if they can be resolved at all.
All they can really do is give it time. And that clock starts when they stop litigating.
image credit: Robbert van der Steeg
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