The Lawyer as Illusionist: Magic, Therapy or PR? What Clients Really Need from Us

A client came to see me with a thick file and a sentence I hear more often than you might expect: “I want you to destroy him.” Two hours into the conversation it was clear that going to court might settle the dispute, but it would not give him what he needed. He needed to clear his name in public, which is a job for PR. He needed to stop suffering from insomnia and tightness in his chest, which belongs with a doctor and a psychologist. And he needed to convince his co-owner that he had not “lost his mind” and did have a strategy for the case. Three problems that look legal, and the law has no answer to any of them. His previous lawyer had run the case for three years and never once told him: “This layer is outside my craft. You need to deal with it elsewhere.”

Cases like this are not the exception. In our practice we keep seeing civil disputes that drag on for years because of something only loosely connected with the law. The dispute is the symptom and the cause lies elsewhere. A lawyer who cannot tell the two apart ends up billing the client for treatment the diagnosis does not call for.

This piece is about the limits of legal practice: when a lawyer is genuinely needed, and when what sits behind their door is work for a psychotherapist, a crisis communications adviser or a mediator. It is also about why admitting that limit is one of the most valuable services a good lawyer can offer. I think we do it far too rarely in Czech legal practice.

¶ When all you have is a hammer

In The Psychology of Science (1966), Abraham Maslow remarked that if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as a nail. A client whose business conflict has turned into a personal crisis is holding the hammer of the whole system. Everyone tells him to “see a lawyer”, and nobody tells him to “put a team together”. That single signpost points to my office.

If my diary is empty, or I simply am not thinking, I take the case, assess the legal side and start drafting a statement of claim. The client pays my hourly rate as though I were the only person who could help him. Neither of us says out loud that a lawsuit will fix only a small part of what is troubling him.

American legal scholarship has an umbrella term for this way of thinking: the comprehensive law movement. Susan Daicoff uses it for about ten parallel currents, from therapeutic jurisprudence and restorative justice to collaborative law and problem-solving courts. What they share is an effort to resolve legal matters in a way that does as little harm as possible to the wellbeing and relationships of the people involved (Scandinavian Studies in Law, 2006). That is my starting point too: a legal problem is usually part of a wider human problem, and a lawyer who misses that can win the case and still fail the client.

¶ Therapeutic jurisprudence and triage

The most influential foundation for this view was laid by David Wexler and Bruce Winick under the name therapeutic jurisprudence (the key collection is Law in a Therapeutic Key, 1996). They do not argue that lawyers should act as therapists. Their point is that the law and the way it is applied have side effects on people's mental wellbeing, both helpful and harmful, and the profession needs to take them into account. Litigation can break a client psychologically even when he wins. A good mediation or a sensible settlement, on the other hand, can bring relief, even if it yields less money than a court might have awarded.

In practice, this means a lawyer needs triage. The term comes from emergency medicine, where patients are quickly sorted by urgency and by who should treat them. In legal practice it means working out what is a matter for a lawyer, what for a mediator, what for a PR agency and what for a psychotherapist. Whoever talks to the client first should be able to do it.

Clients usually arrive with a mix of these layers and often do not know themselves where the core lies. A lawyer therefore has two tasks: recognise which layers are in play, and tell the client, before the first invoice, which of them they can deal with and which they cannot.

This is not financially comfortable. The part of the budget I send to another professional is money I do not earn. I am convinced, though, that a client to whom I say “this is more for a psychotherapist than for me” will come back and recommend us to others. Trust pays better than opportunism in the end.

¶ Ackoff: solve it or dissolve it

Russell Ackoff, one of the pioneers of operations research and systems thinking, wrote: “The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become.” (Re-Creating the Corporation, 1999). A flawlessly drafted claim in a misunderstood dispute will not save the client. It will only drag him deeper into the wrong fight.

In his article The Art and Science of Mess Management (Interfaces, 1981), Ackoff distinguished four ways of approaching a problem:

• absolution: ignore the problem and hope it goes away,
• resolution: do something that is good enough,
• solution: find the best possible answer,
• dissolution: change the system or its environment so that the problem ceases to exist.

Legal practice usually offers resolution and solution, in other words some way of settling the dispute. Often, though, the right answer is dissolution: changing the structure the dispute grows out of. Splitting a company whose partners no longer have anything in common. Rewriting a contractual framework that has the conflict built into it. Reorganising a family business so that three generations no longer have to meet at a single general meeting. In the narrow sense, these are not legal solutions. A lawyer designs them together with the client's economist and tax adviser, and sometimes with a therapist.

Ackoff meant absolution as a mistake: we ignore the problem and hope it sorts itself out. A deliberate decision to let a matter go is something else, and in my view it is one of the most undervalued pieces of advice in Czech legal practice. Sometimes a client needs to hear that the dispute is not worth it. Even if he is right, carrying on would cost him more years, money and health than he stands to gain. If you tell him and he takes the advice, you may save him five years, half a million Czech crowns (roughly EUR 20,000) and plenty of sleepless nights. If you keep quiet because you would lose the brief, you have an ethical problem that every lawyer has to settle with himself.

¶ Recognition instead of money

Where litigation cannot help with what the client is really carrying, that is, the need for recognition, an apology or closure, restorative justice offers tools. Its classic author is Howard Zehr, with the book Changing Lenses (1990). In his account, traditional criminal justice sees a crime as a breach of the law and looks for a culprit and a punishment. Zehr sees it above all as harm done to particular people and relationships, which creates an obligation to put things right.

In the Czech Republic, mediation has its own statute (Act No. 202/2012 Coll.), and a court may order the parties to attend a first meeting with a mediator lasting up to three hours (Section 100(2) of the Czech Code of Civil Procedure). In criminal cases, mediation is provided by the state Probation and Mediation Service. For a civil dispute the restorative perspective matters mainly because, in my experience, disputes that people fight for years often have an unmet need for recognition at their core. A client who gets money but no recognition often does not feel the matter is closed. A client who gets recognition without money may well feel it is. That, admittedly, is rare.

This leads to a question worth asking at the very first meeting: “What would you be willing to accept in place of part of the money if the other side did this?” The “this” is something with no monetary value: a written statement, an apology, a joint statement to third parties, an entry in company records. Often it reveals the outline of a deal that money alone would never have produced.

For me, this has been one of the most surprising lessons from practice. Years later, clients looked back more favourably on disputes whose settlement included a non-monetary element (an apology, a joint statement, a gesture) than on those that ended better financially. And it was often cheaper, because recognition tends to cost the other side less than the same value in money.

¶ Crisis communication: when the problem is reputation

There is a whole class of problems where a lawyer has nothing to offer, and companies hire one anyway: media and reputational crises. Our profession is not trained for them.

W. Timothy Coombs developed Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) for exactly these situations, summarised in an article in Corporate Reputation Review (2007) and set out at length in his book Ongoing Crisis Communication. Under this theory, the response depends on the type of crisis and on how far the public holds the company responsible for it. When the company is itself a victim (a natural disaster, malicious interference from outside, a rumour), it is usually enough to inform quickly and show what it is doing. When the crisis is an unintended accident, such as a technical failure or a product recall caused by a technical fault, Coombs recommends explaining the circumstances and reducing the perception of responsibility. The company should turn to an apology and compensation if it has had a similar crisis before or already has a damaged reputation. When the crisis arose from a preventable breach of the rules, it requires a full apology, acceptance of responsibility and compensation. A badly chosen response can deepen the crisis.

This is exactly where legal and communications strategies tend to collide. A lawyer instinctively opts for defensive communication: do not admit liability, do not apologise, since the other side may use an apology in court, and say no more than necessary. In legal terms, that protects the procedural position. In reputational terms, it can be suicide. Crisis communication, after all, usually puts the emphasis on the speed of the first response and a coherent story, with the precision of the legal wording coming second.

Crisis communication should therefore be run by a crisis communications expert. The lawyer's task is narrow and precisely defined: to make sure the company does not admit facts that would establish its liability, and that the wording does not harm its procedural position. Tone, narrative, timing and channels are for the specialist to decide. If the client has no such specialist to hand, the lawyer should find one rather than stand in for one.

One of my long-standing clients has a rule worth quoting: “When you have a crisis, three people must be in the room within two hours: a lawyer, crisis PR and the finance director. If you only have one, you have an answer in one dimension, and the crisis will flatten you in the other two.”

¶ Where a lawyer's role ends

Edgar Schein, a long-time professor at MIT, described in Process Consultation Revisited (1999) and Helping (2009) three roles in which a professional can help:

1. The expert supplies the information or service the client asked for. This is the traditional picture of a lawyer: “bring me the file and I'll draft the claim”. It works when the client knows exactly what he needs.
2. The doctor makes a diagnosis and prescribes treatment. The client brings symptoms and the professional determines what is actually going on.
3. The process consultant helps the client understand his problem himself and builds a relationship in which that is possible.

Schein recommends always starting as a process consultant: first use a humble question to find out what the problem actually is, and only then move into the role of expert or doctor. Advice given before the helper understands the problem can, in his view, be irrelevant or even offensive. For a lawyer, this means not switching straight to “I'll send a letter before action” after the client's first sentence (“I've got a problem with my business partner”). Without that opening question, triage does not work.

In The Reflective Practitioner (1983), Donald Schön described how experienced professionals think about what they are doing while they are doing it, and adjust their approach accordingly. For lawyers, I draw two rules from this. Diagnosis before a claim: a lawsuit is not the default output but one of several, and it has to justify why it is the right one. And after every major step, a question about its side effects, psychological, relational, reputational and economic, not only procedural.

Clients who come with a dispute that is partly legal, partly psychological and partly reputational are normal clients. Part of what they pay for is a lawyer who can say: “This is beyond my expertise, and I know someone who does it better.” A lawyer who instead brushes them off with “we only deal with legal matters here” loses one of the main reasons the profession exists.

May a lawyer advise a client to see a psychotherapist, hire crisis PR or consider whether he really wants to litigate? The ethical rules do not prohibit such advice. The Czech Legal Profession Act requires a lawyer to protect and promote the client's legitimate interests and to pursue on the client's behalf everything he considers beneficial (Section 16 of Act No. 85/1996 Coll.). The code of conduct of the Czech Bar Association (Resolution No. 1/1997 of its Board, last amended in 2026) expects a lawyer to decline a matter for which he lacks sufficient experience or specialist knowledge, unless the client agrees after an explanation; in that case he generally proceeds in cooperation with another lawyer or another expert (Article 8(2)). The American model rules go further. Rule 2.1 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct allows a lawyer to refer in his advice to moral, economic, social and political considerations, and its comment recommends referring the client to a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker or accountant where a competent lawyer would do so.

I see three limits:

1. A lawyer does not carry out an intervention he is not qualified for. He can recommend a psychotherapist but should not provide therapy himself. He can recommend crisis PR, but acting as a crisis communications adviser without training is professionally questionable. Where he goes beyond his expertise, he hands over.
2. A lawyer does not abuse closeness. A long, confidential relationship gives him unusual insight into the client's weak spots. He can use it for the client's benefit, which is what the client pays for, or against him, at which point he would cease to be a lawyer in any professional sense.
3. A lawyer can admit that he is not the person the client needs. Psychologically, this is the hardest part. It takes a professional who does not derive his worth from how indispensable he appears. Those who cannot do it keep the client dependent on them. Those who can let the client go to people who will help him, and the client then comes back because he wants to.

¶ Conclusion: honest magic and fraudulent magic

In the end, the client from the opening never went to court. For six months a psychotherapist looked after his insomnia, crisis PR after his reputation, a mediator after the conversation with his co-owner, and I after the narrow legal frame. The matter ended in a settlement that brought less money than we might have dared to fight for in court, but gave the client his life back. Five years later he told me it was the only “win” in his life he is proud of.

I consider the highest form of a lawyer's role to be the adviser who knows the client, his business and his family well enough to advise on what not to do, and when to end a dispute. That kind of work is hard to bill by the hour. It is better suited to a long-term relationship with a fixed fee, in which the lawyer has no reason to push the client into further steps.

The fraudulent trick is pretending the law can do what it cannot. The honest one, in this case, was neither legal nor mine. It lay in the lawyer not handling the matter alone.

Related reading: how a judge decides and what each side really wants in the piece on the psychology of the parties, why classical negotiation doctrine fails against an irrational adversary in the article on asymmetric defence, and the scientific background of negotiation in Statutes Are Just the Foundation: Psychology and Tactics in a Legal Dispute. On the practical side, when to litigate and when not and when to choose mediation over court.

¶ Further Reading

• Ackoff, R. L. (1981). The Art and Science of Mess Management. Interfaces, 11(1), 20–26.
• Ackoff, R. L. (1999). Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century. Oxford University Press.
• American Bar Association. Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 2.1 Advisor, including the comment.
• Coombs, W. T. (1999/2014). Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, and Responding. Sage.
• Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting Organization Reputations During a Crisis: The Development and Application of Situational Crisis Communication Theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(3), 163–176.
• Česká advokátní komora. Usnesení představenstva č. 1/1997 Věstníku, kterým se stanoví pravidla profesionální etiky a pravidla soutěže advokátů České republiky (etický kodex), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.
• Daicoff, S. (2006). The Comprehensive Law Movement: An Emerging Approach to Legal Problems. Scandinavian Studies in Law, 49, 109–128.
• Maslow, A. H. (1966). The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. Harper & Row.
• Schein, E. H. (1999). Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship. Addison-Wesley.
• Schein, E. H. (2009). Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help. Berrett-Koehler.
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
• Wexler, D. B., & Winick, B. J. (1996). Law in a Therapeutic Key: Developments in Therapeutic Jurisprudence. Carolina Academic Press.
• Zehr, H. (1990). Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. Herald Press.