Attorneys often need to communicate with multiple members of a client’s team in order to adequately represent a client’s interests. This can sometimes include team members who have different interests from each other, and this may inject lawyers into the office politics of a client. In most circumstances, lawyers should try to avoid the office politics of a client, and attorneys can take a few steps to help ensure that they minimize the chance that their work will impact the internal politics of the organizations they serve.
One time, I was doing legal work for a large organization, and I needed to communicate with several different teams within the organization. It was apparent to me that there was animosity between people that worked for this client. Each of the employees bad-mouthed the other and talked about how the others were bad at their jobs. I am not sure why this animosity exited. Perhaps each of the teams needed to compete for limited funding at an organization, or perhaps the employees had a water cooler beef that had existed for years. In any case, this animosity made it difficult to work for this client since each wanted to use my representation to cast good or bad light on individual employees at the firm.
Eventually, I tried my best to coordinate my efforts away from these feuding employees and spoke almost exclusively with a manager at the company who was above the office politics. This made it a little more difficult to get the information and documents I needed since this needed to go through a few layers at the client before this reached my desk. But this strategy helped ensure that I was not part of the office politics that created a bad environment at that shop.
Sometimes, a legal representation can take a few different paths, and different people at a client might have varying perspectives on what should be done. In such situations, it might be tempting to side with the person at the client who has the largest capacity to refer additional legal work or just assume that the most senior person at the client is correct.
However, lawyers should try not to let office politics dictate which path should be taken during a representation. Lawyers should try to promote the best strategy they think is available regardless of who at the client agrees with this strategy and who at the client disagrees with the strategy. Usually with some explaining, most employees of clients will get on board with what their lawyer wants to do.
One other sticky situation that arises often when it comes to client politics is mentioning who messed up on a given project. There have been times when clients have tasked certain personnel to answer questions or secure documents and either the wrong information is provided or the requested documents are not furnished. In such a situation, it is tough to tell a manager that a worker has fallen short, since this can jeopardize the lawyer’s connection with an employee that might be helpful to managing a representation.
In such situations it is usually best to approach the worker directly and see if they can remediate any mistakes before escalating anything. In this way, the lawyer can try to stay out of internal politics and ensure they do not create any bad blood.
All told, larger clients are just like larger businesses (including law firms) and accordingly, they have office politics just like other businesses. Lawyers can keep a few things in mind to ensure that they stay out of office politics and focus on completing a representation for a client.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.
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