Theoretically, legal advice, the service of a lawyer usually consists in meaningfully influencing the external relationship of the client – with the contractor, office or court. After a period of practice, an intelligent lawyer should realize that at least as important as this “external” relationship is his “internal” relationship with his client.
The effect of a legal service, its actual assessment is not whether we won the case or whether we carried out a transaction, but how our client assesses what we have done in his case. This assessment is a function of the client’s expectations and the actual effect of the lawyer’s work. A lawyer influences not only the effect of his work, but also the client’s expectations.
Therefore, the starting point must be a reliable definition of the customer’s satisfactory expectations. Lawyers have an ambiguous reputation in this respect, because they often build client expectations in a manner inconsistent with their knowledge and experience. Such a relationship is based on the assumption that, firstly, the client does not fully understand the matter, and secondly – any subsequent deviations from the promised effect can be explained by the failure of the institution or the bad intentions of the other party to the transaction.
In many cases, you can and must take into account that our client – a potential client will find a miracle worker who promises him what we did not want to promise. And our potential client will believe in miracles – which especially happens in ad hoc and very personal matters, where the need to believe in miracles is a rather natural approach. But it can never absolve us from the loyalty that consists primarily of seeing things from the standpoint of the realistic chances of the case, and not our own self-interest, which may even include handling cases that make no sense at all. Loyalty understood in this way is a difficult test in business, because it is not always rewarded, and especially – usually it is not immediately rewarded.