When meeting a client for the first time, I tell my younger colleagues they need to be mindful that a new client almost always tells us only the favourable aspects of their case. They will leave out the awkward or unfavourable aspects of their case. It doesn’t matter what the dispute is – civil, criminal, estate inheritance, family, industrial – a new client always starts with their best foot forward. When I was younger, I …
My father’s firm once had a litigious client. She was in her late thirties or early forties when I was first acquainted with her. I was a few years into my practice. She was beautiful. She was also fiercely intelligent, aggressive and articulate. She was corporate-savvy and ran several businesses she owned. Since it was litigation, it meant my immediate boss dealt with her. And since my immediate boss dealt with her, I was on …
My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe. Yet sure if I do things that I really don’t want to do, it cannot be said that ‘I’ am doing them at all – it must be sin that has made its home in my nature. St Paul’s letter to the Romans [Rom. VII.14ff, Phillips translation] Whenever I am gripped by …
There was a period in my life when I equated small talk with tedium. I don’t think I had a problem with it prior to that or found it so distasteful that I took active measures to avoid it. The feeling stole upon me unawares. During that time, I found the pleasantries and customs of introductory and preliminary conversation at social, formal and family engagements, particularly onerous and boring. There is only so far we …
My father once recited Rudyard Kipling’s If to me. I loved it and resonated with every line in that poem. But some of those lines I hold fast to. One of them is: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same:” Because of that line, whether it is a personal win, a loss, a success, a failure, an achievement, something to be proud of, or something to …