Lawyers, Clients and Friends: A Case Study of the Vexed Nature of Friendship and Lawyering

Abstract

Lawyers are not monads. Lawyers do form personal relationships with others. Lawyers have families and they have friends, neighbours and acquaintances. Formally, this realm of intimate relationships is meant to be separated from the professional role of the lawyer. Lawyers are meant to owe fidelity and loyalty to clients. However, this proposed neat distinction between the personal and professional facets of lawyers' lives does not always reflect the reality of what happens in practice. It is well known that lawyers routinely act for friends and family. Lawyers often act for clients who originally were known to them as private acquaintances, and clients regularly choose lawyers on the recommendation of a mutual friend of both the client and lawyer. Lawyers also form friendships with their clients. A strict adherence to the separation of personal and professional relationships might be damaging to lawyers. Taken to its extreme, such a separation does project the image of the lawyer as a monad shunning all social ties. A strong moratorium against mingling personal and professional ties, in conjunction with other negative pressures on lawyers, such as working hours and stress, could accelerate social isolation among the profession. Surely it is beneficial that lawyers have friends, and therefore conceivable that some of these friendships will result in lawyer/client relationships.