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Justice And Morality Matter

Everyone wants to do the right thing, so let that help you be better a advocate and win for your clients.

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Our system does a decent job of doing justice (when there is a level playing field). To serve your client in this arena, know the moral story, counsel them well, and advocate accordingly.

There is an old (and, in my view, terrible) saw about the student whose professor tells her on the first day of law school, “If you want justice, go to the whorehouse. If you want to get screwed, go to court.”

For a quarter century, I’ve been in and out of all kinds of courts all over (and outside of) our country and I’m glad to say I don’t feel that way. We have enormous problems with our system of justice — the primary one is that it does not do the best job of efficiently providing justice to those who don’t have tons of money, save for the gleaming exception of small claims courts and the occasional private attorney general matter, like a civil rights suit or a class action. But I found in my old prosecutor days and my practice at my firm where we focus on complex business disputes that when you go to court in most criminal matters, and in the civil matters where there is not a gulf in resources between each side, our system — overall, and in general — does justice.

This matters not only to us as citizens, but as advocates; the system usually works, justice is usually done. Another way of putting this is that morality — more precisely, the moral story behind the dispute — matters. This reality should influence how we advise our clients and our advocacy choices.

It’s another old saw that the trial lawyer with the better story wins at trial. I completely agree. But this point — that justice matters and so the moral story matters — has application outside the trial context. There are lots of bad people, but most people have a sense of right and wrong and want to believe that they are doing the right thing. Most people are motivated by a moral story.

I saw this recently in a highly complex dispute where one party was better resourced and, in large part due to that, had some victories in litigation that made it tough for the smaller party. Yet everyone got together and worked out a final result that was somewhat fair. Each side was unhappy to a degree (the classic situation where a mediator says, “If I’ve done my job you’ll all be unhappy today but happier than you would if you kept fighting.”). But we achieved a settlement for — amongst many other reasons — the sense by all sides, even those who had fought each other tooth and nail for the better part of a decade, that the result was fair.

This becomes another tool in our advocate’s toolbox: everyone wants to do the right thing. This can determine our advice to our clients (helping them do the right thing should be part of our counsel). But it also helps us be better advocates and win for our clients.

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john-balestriereJohn Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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