You Jump, I Jump: The Perils of Over-Identifying With a Client

<p dir="ltr">Over-identifying with a client can impair objective representation. The Law Society of British Columbia’s “Common-sense Guidelines for Family Law Lawyers” includes nine “Best Practice Guidelines for Lawyers Practicing Family Law”. The second one is that “lawyers should strive to remain objective at all times” and should not “over-identify with clients or be unduly influenced by the emotions of the moment.” In the midst of doing some research recently, I did a search on CanLII of professional misconduct decisions involving family lawyers and I came across an interesting relationship. Of the first thirteen decisions that I looked at, five of them (involving three different family lawyers) involved a lawyer who had experienced their own acrimonious family law matter, and that experience was intertwined with why they ended up violating their professional obligations – they were unable to remain objective. My small sample is not statistically interesting enough to point to any larger trend, but it did make me think about the perils of over-identifying with a client, and how seemingly easy it is to do that. In this post, I suggest that over-identifying can cause a lawyer to become hyper-zealous or violate the duty of loyalty. As a result, perhaps family lawyers have a heightened responsibility to be self-reflective and self-aware of their own triggers in order to avoid the risks that flow from over-identifying with a client or their interests.</p>