The Best Way to Destroy an Enemy Is to Make Him a Friend

• Publication year: 2023
• Author: Written by Sidney Kanazawa

THE BEST WAY TO DESTROY AN ENEMY IS TO MAKE HIM A FRIEND

Written by Sidney Kanazawa^*

"Zealous advocacy" often blinds us to possibilities that are right before us. To see them, we may need to change how we perceive ourselves and our opponents.

When she was on the bench, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary House (ret.), once faced two incessantly combative lawyers who each claimed entitlement to $40,000 in sanctions against the other. Rather than decide their reciprocal discovery motions, she ordered the two attorneys to have lunch together, to ask a set of questions about each other, and to report back at 1:30 p.m. They balked but after lunch they sent a note to Judge House's clerk that they had settled the case. A year later, they visited Judge House's chambers to let her know that they and their families had become friends and were now vacationing together on a regular basis.

Born out of courage, the concept of "zealous advocacy" advances a noble goal of client loyalty that is sometimes distorted into justifying bullying, hiding, posturing, rudeness, and other competitive behavior. In the name of "zealous advocacy," some attorneys (and clients) feel compelled to treat opponents as "enemies" and are uncomfortable befriending and collaborating with opponents to harmonize competing viewpoints — a misunderstanding of our practical role as lawyers and how we can most effectively perform that role.

In 1820, British barrister Henry Lord Brougham, while vigorously defending Queen Caroline against a charge of adultery, scandalously threatened — at his own and the monarchy's peril — to disclose the secret marriage of her husband, King George IV, and thereby popularized "zealous advocacy" as a lawyer's duty. "[A]n advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, among them, to himself, is his first and only duty; and in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the torments, the destruction which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion." (2 The Trial at Large of Her Majesty, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, Queen of Great Britain; in the House of Lords, on Charges of Adulterous Intercourse 3 (London, printed for T. Kelly 1821).)

This concept — "zealous advocacy" — was incorporated in the first ABA Canons of Professional Ethics (1908) with the words "warm zeal." It invoked the same dedication and fearlessness expressed by Brougham, except his "reckless of consequences" approach was tempered by a practical adherence to truth, trust, and the rule of law.

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How Far a Lawyer May Go in Supporting a Client's Cause? Nothing operates more certainly to create or to foster popular prejudice against lawyers as a class, and to deprive the profession of that full measure of public esteem and confidence which belongs to the proper discharge of its duties than does the false claim, often set up by the unscrupulous in defense of questionable transactions, that it is the duty of the lawyer to do whatever may enable him to succeed in winning his client's cause.
"The lawyer owes 'entire devotion to the interest of the client, warm zeal in the maintenance and defense of his rights and the exertion of his utmost learning and ability,' to the end that nothing be taken or be withheld from him, save by the rules of law,

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