From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1980 |
| Pages | 535 |
| Citation | Vol. 9 No. 3 Pg. 535 |
1980, March, Pg. 535. From The Wool-Sack
Shakespeare, Hamlet: II, ii, 263.
One of the things we as lawyers must learn to live with is the occasional animosity from clients we represent who are on the losing side of lawsuits. Such losses, as we all know, never occur because the client has a poor case, but rather because the lawyer representing the client did a poor job. The lawyer who wishes to protect himself from such animosity soon learns that the animosity is assuaged only a little if the client is told by the lawyer before the trial that the case is a poor one and should be settled. If the client refuses to settle notwithstanding such advice and then loses, it remains the lawyer's fault that the case was lost. That, for the benefit of you who are wondering, is part of the reason why some legislators are now telling the press that the Attorney General's office did a "tremendously rotten job"(fn1) representing the legislature in the recent suit brought by prison inmates against the State of Colorado.
You may recall that the Assistant Attorney General trying the case suggested to the Governor and to the legislature shortly before the trial began that the case brought by the inmates should be settled. The reason, I assume, that the suggestion was made, was that the attorney feared losing. He feared losing not because he thought himself imcompetent, but rather because he thought the case weak on its merits, an opinion Judge Kane eventually came to share.
The legislature rejected the attorney's suggestion, not, I assume, because it thought it would win, but because it has never in recent memory encountered a situation in which compromise was required and did not recognize such a situation when confronted with it. Not being particularly sophisticated, it failed to perceive the difference between lawsuits which even legislatures may lose, and other matters it deals with. This lack of sophistication also explains why when, to its surprise, the state lost the lawsuit, its members assigned the blame not to their own ill-tempered refusal to settle what was ostensibly not a particularly good lawsuit, but rather to the incompetence of the State's legal counsel. Of such...
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