Do Arguments Work? It’s Debatable.

I went to law school because I was good at arguing and, like most people, I thought that was what lawyers were supposed to do. Today, I spend most of my time helping my clients understand how little can be accomplished through arguments.

Arguments by lawyers are generally no more successful than the arguments most of us have in our homes. Yet, somehow they are hard to resist. It has taken me many years to accept that fact. During the first 20 years of my legal career I spent a lot of time impressing clients with my skills in argument. Clients would come to me and describe some wrong that their spouse had committed and ask me to “do something”. I often responded by writing great argumentative letters and my clients loved it. They did not realize they had just paid me $250.00 per hour to do something that was actually going to make it harder for them to achieve their goals.

Helping my clients achieve their goals usually means helping them convince their spouse to agree with them on many key issues. (More than 95% of all cases settle, so it generally comes down to persuading the other party.) The letters I sent, (and most letters sent by attorneys in these situations), failed to change anyone’s mind. To the contrary, the best arguments simply caused the other spouse to become more entrenched in their r positions and resulted in the other attorney writing a similar letter “arguing their case”. These return letters, of course, always caused my client to become even more entrenched in their positions as well, driving both parties farther away from achieving their goals.

When I reflect on the impact of my arguments in my personal life, the results are
about the same; (at best harmless, at worst damaging to my ultimate goals.) So, what does this mean? Should we abandon our efforts to advocate for ourselves and should I, as an attorney neglect my obligation to advocate for my clients? Of course not. The problem is that we have all come to equate arguments with advocacy so we fail to notice that most arguments are actually very weak tools for standing up for ourselves or others.

The subject of just want constitutes effective advocacy, (or standing up for ourselves), is a subject for another day. For now, I will simply fall back on the old adage that we “catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” When I recently reminded a friend of this old saying, he was quick to point out that “in fact, you can catch even more flies with manure.” Can’t argue with that.