From What about Clients, Is "Professionalism" a Smokescreen for Bad Lawyering?

What About Clients (Auld Alliance or no Auld Alliance i'm not calling it what about Paris!) is the blog you read if you want to be a good lawyer.

Professionalism--like good crops, the flag and motherhood--is indeed hard to criticize. It is also tough to define. Is it always good for clients? Can it even hurt them?

It's not about the lawyers anymore. In litigation, and in other contentious projects, does the practice of routinely and without question granting extensions, expanding deadlines, and saying "yes" to an adversary's requests for an accommodation really help clients? Or are such courtesies merely effete and provincial folkways that take the focus off the main event: solving problems for clients as expeditiously as possible? See "Professionalism Revisited: What About the Client?" in San Diego's The Daily Transcript of April 29, 2005. Has anything changed in five years?