Abstract:
Lawyers are obliged to act in the interests of their clients, however, it is not clear how lawyers should do this in practice. Should lawyers follow their clients’ instructions without deviation, should they actively manage their clients’ expectations, or as many studies suggest, do lawyers place their own interests first? This paper examines how lawyers interact with medical malpractice claimants. It reveals that lawyers take a client-aligned approach, where lawyers acknowledge their client’s goals, but do not necessarily do what the client says. We argue that this approach is made necessary by legal and organisational constraints which limit the ability of lawyers to produce the types of outcomes that their clients want.
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Angela Lee Melville, Frank Stephen and Tammy Krause, “He did everything he possibly could for me”: medical malpractice claimants’ experiences of lawyer–client relations. International Journal of the Legal Profession, DOI: 10.1080/09695958.2015.1025791. Published online: 27 Mar 2015.
First posted 2015-04-01 08:19:21
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