Professionalism and Civility in a Combative Profession

Early in my career I watched a senior litigator tear a strip off opposing counsel in a hallway outside a courtroom. It was fluent, precise, and cruel, and a small part of me thought it looked like power. Years later I understood it for what it was: a lawyer who had confused winning the moment with winning the case. The judge remembered. The other side dug in. What could have settled in an afternoon took another eighteen months.

The profession trains you to argue. It does not always train you to do it well, and the difference between a good advocate and a merely aggressive one is mostly a matter of self-control. This is a piece about holding your ground without losing your bearings.

Adversarial is not the same as hostile

Our system is built on opposition. Two sides push, a neutral decides, and the friction is supposed to produce something closer to the truth than either side would reach alone. That structure is a feature, not a flaw, and it means conflict is baked into the job. You will spend a career disagreeing with people for a living.

The mistake is to read "adversarial" as permission to be hostile. They are different things. Adversarial means you take a position and defend it against genuine challenge. Hostile means you make it personal, treat the other lawyer as an enemy, and let the temperature of the dispute climb until nobody can think clearly. The first is the work. The second is a failure to do the work.

Civility is not softness, and it is not conceding. Some of the fiercest advocates I have known were unfailingly courteous, and their courtesy made them more dangerous, not less. When you are calm, you are legible to the judge and illegible to your opponent. They cannot get a rise out of you because you are not offering one.

Why civility is a professional obligation, not a personality trait

It is tempting to treat this as a question of temperament: some people are naturally gracious, others are prickly, and that is just how it is. That framing lets you off the hook, and it is wrong.

Every law society in Canada expects lawyers to conduct themselves with courtesy and good faith toward colleagues, opponents, and the court. The rules of professional conduct are not suggestions about being nice. They are enforceable standards, and incivility that crosses into abusive or dishonest conduct can draw real regulatory consequences. If you want the actual language, your provincial regulator publishes its code of conduct, and it is worth reading once with an eye to the sections on civility and candour. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada maintains the model code that most provinces adapt.

So civility is a duty you owe whether or not you feel like it that day. The good news is that the obligation and your self-interest point in the same direction, which is not always true in law.

The practical case: incivility loses cases

Set the ethics aside for a moment and look at it coldly, as a tactician would.

Judges are people who spend their days reading and listening, and they form impressions fast. A lawyer who is theatrically rude to opposing counsel is telling the bench something about their judgment, and none of it is flattering. When your credibility is your currency, you do not want to spend it looking petty.

Here is what incivility actually costs you:

• Cooperation you will need later. Litigation runs on countless small courtesies: an extension when your witness gets sick, agreement on an exhibit book, a sensible schedule. Burn the other side early and every one of those becomes a fight.
• The judge's benefit of the doubt. Close calls get decided by whoever the decision-maker trusts more. Rudeness quietly moves you to the wrong side of that ledger.
• Your own clarity. Anger is expensive cognition. When you are furious you miss the weak point in your own argument and the opening in theirs.
• Settlement, which is how most files actually end. People do not make reasonable deals with someone who has spent months treating them with contempt.

The lawyer who wins the hallway argument and loses the case has traded something durable for something that evaporates by dinner.

None of this means rolling over. It means choosing your battles and fighting the ones that matter on the merits, where you are strongest, rather than in a personal register where everyone loses.

What civility looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

The grand moments are rare. Civility is mostly a hundred small decisions nobody applauds you for.

It is granting the routine extension without making the other lawyer grovel, because next month it will be your witness in the hospital. It is writing the firm letter without the sneering adjectives, so that if it ends up in front of a judge it reads as reasonable rather than shrill. It is correcting the record when you realize you cited something wrong, even when no one caught it. It is not cc'ing the client on every email so you can perform toughness for an audience.

For a new lawyer or an articling student, the pressure often runs the other way. A client wants to see fire. A principal has a combative style you feel you should imitate. There is a myth, still circulating, that the best advocates are the meanest ones. Do not absorb it. The advocates with real staying power are almost always the ones other lawyers trust, because trust is what lets you get things done at speed.

If you are still finding your footing in the day-to-day of practice, surviving your articling year has more on managing pressure without absorbing everyone else's bad habits, and this holds true across every setting, from a Bay Street tower to a small firm.

Staying principled when a client pushes

The harder tests are not with opposing counsel. They come from your own side.

Sooner or later a client will ask you to do something that is aggressive past the point of principled: to bury the other side in motions to run up their costs, to take a position you know is thin, to be nasty because they are angry and paying you to be their proxy. Your job is to advocate for them zealously. Your job is also to refuse to become an instrument of harassment, and to know where the line sits before you are standing on it.

This is easier if you have thought it through in advance. Decide, early and in calm conditions, what you will and will not do. A few principles I have found worth holding:

1. Separate the client's interests from the client's feelings. They are often paying you to protect the former while they vent the latter. The strategy that satisfies their anger is frequently the one that damages their case.
2. Never lie, to anyone, ever. Not to the court, not to opposing counsel, not by careful omission. Your word has to be worth something, because a lawyer whose word is worthless is useless to a client.
3. Push back in writing. When you counsel a client against a scorched-earth move, say so in a note. It protects them, it protects you, and it forces a moment of reflection.
4. Know your exits. If a client insists on conduct you cannot ethically pursue, you can decline the instruction, and in the right circumstances you can withdraw. Knowing that gives you a spine.

Holding these lines is not always comfortable, and it occasionally costs you a client. It has never once cost me a night's sleep, which is a trade I would make every time. If any of this is weighing on you, mental health in law is worth reading alongside this.

Civility is not weakness, and rudeness is not strength

Somewhere the profession picked up the idea that toughness and cruelty are the same thing. They are not related at all. Toughness is preparation, nerve, and a willingness to say the hard thing to a judge's face when it needs saying. Cruelty is what people reach for when they lack the first three.

The most formidable opponent I ever faced never raised her voice. She was scrupulously polite, returned every call, conceded the small points instantly, and then beat me cleanly on the two that mattered because she had done more work than I had. I have thought about her often. She taught me that grace under pressure is not the opposite of winning. Frequently it is the mechanism.

Building a reputation you will not have to explain

The legal community in any city is smaller than it looks. The lawyer you snipe at in a motion today may be the one deciding whether to give your junior a break next year, or the one who becomes a judge, or the one a colleague calls for a quiet reference about you. You are building a reputation from your first day whether you mean to or not, and it compounds.

Choose to build one you will not have to explain later. Be the lawyer whose word is reliable, whose letters are firm but fair, and whose opponents grudgingly admit is a straight shooter. That reputation opens doors, shortens fights, and earns the benefit of the doubt in the close cases. It is, in the plainest terms, good business.

When you are weighing where to article or which offers to chase, pay attention to how a place treats people under pressure. Ask about it in interviews. A firm's culture around civility tells you a great deal about what your daily life will feel like, and it is a fair thing to raise while you are comparing openings on the job board or reading more about the profession itself.

The work is adversarial. It is supposed to be. But the friction belongs on the arguments, not the people. Get that distinction right early, and you will spend your career being underestimated by the loud and respected by the ones who actually decide things.