Ideas Worth Sharing
TAKE YOUR ADVERSARY TO LUNCH WEEK
All across Illinois, let’s pick a week and encourage all lawyers to take an adversary to lunch. The intent is to keep the bureaucracy (in organizing this project) to a minimum and have this be an informal and voluntary program.
This week of activity would:
- Promote civility and professionalism in the legal community
- Improve the morale of the bar
- Build trust among lawyers so that the next time adversaries meet, there is a better chance of cooperation
- Provide a model for younger lawyers who often view opposing counsel as “the enemy”
- Allow for the education of the Bar with respect to various attorneys’ practices
- Possibly lead to settlement, discussions or negotiations
- Provide an example for clients who elieve that lawyers should only be hired guns
- Serve as marketing lunches which might produce referrals
- Provide good public relations for the legal profession which certainly can use all the good PR it can get
CIVILITY AGREEMENT
If we are to advance civility among Illinois lawyers we may wish to propose guidelines for relations between opposing lawyers, especially for handling several specific, recurring situations that often generate incivility. Two key features of any proposed guidelines would be:
- They are voluntarily accepted by counsel at the beginning of the case, rather than imposed by a Court
- They are unilateral, not conditional upon the opponent’s agreement to adhere to them, though they are designed to encourage reciprocity.
This idea comes from the state of Georgia, which convened a group to generate ideas on how to break they cycle of tit-for-tat relations between opposing lawyers.