Law Commons^™

The Dilemma Of The Vengeful Client: A Prescriptive Framework For Cooling The Flames Of Anger, Robin Slocum

Robin Slocum

Lawyers are presented with a challenging dilemma when counseling angry clients who seek to use the legal system as a weapon for vengeance. Legal scholars have argued that lawyers should, where appropriate, dissuade their angry clients from litigation strategies that are immoral or arguably unethical. However, angry clients are remarkably resistant to appeals based on morality and reason. Thus, it is not surprising that lawyers have been largely ineffective in their efforts to dissuade angry clients from using the legal system as a battlefield. Instead, lawyers often reluctantly defer to clients whose judgment is impaired by their emotional reactivity.

This …