Do you disagree with "Painting the most favourable picture for his client goes with that"
Semi-related but very valuable advice, if well-known - when I was off sick the council brought a complaint against me. They actually lied and implied criminal behaviour (fraud) on my part (also not turning over all the evidence to the tribunal that followed). So here's the important bit:
DO IT IN WRITING AND KEEP COPIES OF EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, EVERYTHING THEY SEND YOU. INSIST ON IT BEING ON PAPER (NOT TELEPHONE), AND PRINT EMAILS OUT.
I could rebut almost everything bad they said about me. The tribunal threw out their case before I even turned up.
(I know this is obvious and everyone says get it in writing, but things would be smoother if people actually did).
But there is no truth in an adversary justice system (and I'm not sure about the other systems either). There are only the parties' differing perspectives (if they were not differing there wouldn't be a complaint) and a court ruling at the end, which we take for impartial.
Imagine I receive a letter from a lawyer saying "It appears your product A infringes our client's patents B and C"
That's fairly clearly a statement of fact - that in their professional opinion they believe their client has a reasonable chance of prevailing in court.
Do lawyers not have an obligation to display good faith and professional candour in making such statements of fact, even to their adversaries?
I do not agree that's clearly a statement of fact. An unrelated example that demonstrates why: laat week, I was having a (text) conversation with two other people, and I made a comment to the effect of, "I think it's a waste of time for you to argue about X, figuring out how to do Y would be more productive instead." To which one of the other participants responded, "...but we were talking about Z, not X!"
The literal words we had written were the facts. Their meaning was up for interpretation. If something as basic as the subject of a conversation cannot be necessarily be agreed upon, something more complicated like "does this infringe on a patent?" certainly has room for disagreement.
Semi-related but very valuable advice, if well-known - when I was off sick the council brought a complaint against me. They actually lied and implied criminal behaviour (fraud) on my part (also not turning over all the evidence to the tribunal that followed). So here's the important bit:
DO IT IN WRITING AND KEEP COPIES OF EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING YOU WRITE, EVERYTHING THEY SEND YOU. INSIST ON IT BEING ON PAPER (NOT TELEPHONE), AND PRINT EMAILS OUT.
I could rebut almost everything bad they said about me. The tribunal threw out their case before I even turned up.
(I know this is obvious and everyone says get it in writing, but things would be smoother if people actually did).