In closed-door conversations between lawyers and their clients strategy is planned, tactics are devised, and the emotional climate of the divorce is established. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients suggests that most divorces are marked less by a pattern of aggressive advocacy than by one of inaction and drift. It uncovers reasons why lawyers find divorce practice frustrating and difficult and why clients frequently feel dissatisfied with their lawyers. This new work provides a unique perspective on the dynamics of professionalism. Sarat and Felstiner show how both lawyers and clients are able to draw on resources of power to set the agenda of their interaction, while neither one is fully in charge.
Power then works through the creation of shared meanings.
Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients examines the effort to create such shared meanings about the nature of marriage and why marriages fail, the operation of the legal process, and the best way to bring divorces to closure. It will be fascinating reading for anyone who is going through, or has gone through a divorce, as well as for lawyers, judges, and scholars of law and society. This astonishing book provides a more concrete, intimate picture of the lawyer-client relation than I would have thought possible. In doing so, it challenges most of the conventional assumptions about lawyering. Theoretically, it is a brilliant interpretive study of the way meanings are made and contested in discussions between legal professionals and their clients.