Repeat after me: being a good lawyer means doing good for the client.

Time Ferris, in his post How Not to Use a Lawyer, explains well how lawyers can serve their clients.  Ferri’s observations are a “personal case study” provoked by an obnoxious letter from a laywer representing a business Ferris had actually spoken positively about in his book.  The lawyer had a legitimate request to make to Ferris regarding the specifics of Ferris’s written statement, but the letter was so obnoxious all it did was end up hurting the lawyer’s client.  Ferris’s points:

1. How you say something IS what you say.

2. It’s counterproductive to threaten someone until you determine their incentives to refuse compliance.

3. It’s better to steer the golden goose rather than kill it.

4. Don’t mistake symptoms with root problems, or confuse correlation with causation.

5. If you threaten someone in a digital world, it might become what your prospective customers see first.