Working Together Towards Resolution: The Client–Lawyer Partnership in Dispute Resolution
Disputes between businesses or individuals can be stressful and expensive to resolve. Time and energy spent dealing with a dispute often diverts valuable attention from core business activities.
When a client comes to a lawyer with a dispute, it is often described in terms of who is right and who is wrong, with each side having their own perspective. In commercial disputes, however, an important factor to bear in mind is what the client actually wants to achieve.
What Does the Client Want?
A client may want to recover money, require something to be done, protect an existing business relationship, avoid media publicity to preserve their reputation, or simply extract themselves from a difficult situation and move forward.
Occasionally, they will want to fight.
The best outcomes in dispute resolution come from a partnership between lawyer and client, working towards the same destination. Once that end goal is understood, the journey towards achieving it can begin.
The Lawyer’s Perspective: Expectations and Commercial Reality
From a lawyer’s perspective, managing client expectations is one of the most important parts of the role.
The lawyer should provide advice early regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the case, the client’s rights and obligations, the evidence required, the options available, and the respective risks and likely costs.
Where necessary, that advice should also include any pre-action requirements, court procedures and the reality that litigation can be slow, uncertain and expensive. Even a successful party usually recovers only part of its legal costs from the other side, while an unsuccessful party may be ordered to pay a portion of the other side’s costs on top of its own.
A client may have a strong legal argument, but that does not necessarily mean that litigating is the best commercial outcome.
A lawyer needs to understand the legal position while also appreciating the commercial realities surrounding the dispute. The line between legal rights and commercial objectives is not always an easy one to draw.
Negotiation then becomes a process of identifying what is essential, what is desirable, and what may be capable of being traded to achieve a mutually acceptable resolution between the parties.
Regular updates and advice throughout the process can help put the client’s mind at ease and, importantly, allow for continued discussion if the client wants to change direction along the way.
The Client’s Perspective: Say What You Really Want
For the client, communicating the end goal or desired commercial outcome is crucial.
Only the client knows what is important to them. A lawyer can advocate for an outcome effectively only if they understand what that outcome looks like for the client.
The client should be open and honest about what they want to achieve and why, the level of risk they are prepared to accept, any budgetary constraints, their priorities and any pressures they are facing.
Every goal requires a different strategy, and monetary considerations are not necessarily the defining factor. If a client’s goal or priority changes along the way, communicating this promptly can save both time and cost.
Conclusion
Clear communication between lawyer and client is essential. It is what allows the relationship to become a genuine collaboration.
The client needs to communicate what they ultimately want to achieve, while the lawyer explains what is realistically achievable within the legal and commercial framework.
Dispute resolution is most effective when the client provides the destination and the lawyer navigates the safest and most cost-effective way to get there.
Dispute resolution is not necessarily about winning; it is about achieving an outcome that makes commercial sense for the client.
Authored by Carolyn Lam, Special Counsel at Bird Law
