Quote from B on May 28, 2022, 11:46 am

Thanks John. I think your feedback is great and helpful.

Some more context: when I decided to involve him on my case, I already had the feeling he was disrespecting me. I was not sure though. But my thinking was:

The added value that he will bring to the case (because he has more experience than me in these kinds of cases) will be helpful in any case. And I can bear this uncertainty for a while.

Then he one-upped me in front of my other client, I did not know how to respond, and I could simply not get past it.

After that episode, I found my thinking shifted to this:

To hell with this guy. I prefer to work on my case alone for thrice the time it would have taken me if I continued to keep him involved, rather than give him the satisfaction of knowing I still need him.

I am realizing now that it's exactly as Lucio mentioned: my "friend" was probably banking on my needing him for my case. That was (in his mind) his leverage.

I then studied the case-law on these points: a) whether I could stop involving him in my case, or if I had a professional obligation to keep him involved (I found I had no obligation to keep him in the loop, as the power of attorney by the client was not joint); b) whether I would have to pay him in any case at the end of the case (I found I would have to pay him only for what he personally contributes, so my not involving him from now on is also increasing my fees proportionally; but, if in the future, he asks to get payment, I will pay him in any case. To me it's the message of me not wanting disrespect and not needing him that's important). 

So in the end I removed all his leverage on me, by stopping involving him on my case altogether (de facto, without saying it to him) and started working on it alone.

The fact that he went to the hearing of his other case (where I was his co-lawyer) on his own (after asking me to go to Court with him!) gave me additional leverage to further justify my not involving him from now on on my case's hearings.

This also totally confirms Lucio's intuition that now would be the worst moment to reengage my friend, as the next hearing is a witness hearing, and my "friend"'s experience with this was one of the reasons I involved him in the first place.

BTW: other lawyers having more experience than me is of course a natural factor in involving another lawyer in a case. If I had all the experience, why should I?

But I found that invariably other lawyers used this leverage to disrespect me. And, conversely, they also disrespected me when they needed me.

Which probably shows that the main problem was exactly what you say (my power-unawareness, my submissiveness, my not being Machiavellian), and not the leverage or the situation in itself.

In fact, so far I think my power-unawareness compelled me to almost always use leverage, instead of sending power signals. It was as if other people were always thinking I was bluffing, and then they were invariably suprised when I escalated and told them off.

So the summary seems to be:

If you are power-intelligent, you will both be able to avoid having to use leverage when you have it, and to avoid giving inexistent leverage to others when they have none.

If you are not, you will be compelled to use leverage most of the times, and others will get leverage on you when the situation does not warrant it.

Which is exactly what Lucio writes here.

In the end, I should have addressed his power-moves directly, especially when he one-upped me in front of my client. That would have been the time for straight talk.

But at the time, I simply didn't know.

There's a positive though: I am realizing that my personal and professional growth was mostly the result of progressively wanting to remove the leverage others had on my life, precisely because I did not know how to address their moves otherwise.