When clients meet me for the first time, one of the things I try to do fairly quickly is to give my client a sense of how I see the attorney-client relationship. People in my line of work are called attorneys, counselors, and lawyers, and sometimes we wear different hats depending on the circumstance. One hat that I do not wear with my client, and I make sure the client knows this, is the hat of “boss.”
The way I explain it is like this: I am not the boss. I am the hired help. You are the boss, the pilot, and I am the navigator. You are the person who makes the decisions about where you want to go. It is my job to tell you if you can get there from here, and if there is an easier way to get there than the way you have planned. It is also my job to tell you how much fuel your trip is likely to consume, and to warn you if the course you want is the equivalent of flying a perfectly good plane into the ground. When you have the information and decide where you are going, it is my job to chart the course to get you there. But you call the shots.
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