A conversation with a friend of mine who happens to wear a elected official’s hat, together with a few others (he has a very large head), included one of his mantras, the Russian front.
This, of course, is a reference to the Germans losing World War II because they tried to fight a war on two fronts and were spread too thin. His use of this reference is to explain why, when confronted with all the things that can and do go wrong in the course of trying to run a government, he picks his battles. Usually, his references comes up after he’s told me about some new fiasco and I chide him on why he, Mr. Elected Official, doesn’t do something about it. This is when he usually regrets having brought up the subject.
It must be nice to be able to pick your battles in this way. Criminal defense lawyers rarely have this luxury. Every defendant has a battle to fight, and expects us to fight it. For private criminal defense lawyers, this may mean 10 or 20 battles at a time. For a public defender, this could mean 150 battles or more at any given moment. Every client believes that we are out there, fighting his battle. And that’s exactly what we are obliged to do. We can’t pick a few of our clients and fight their battles only, leaving the rest to dangle in the wind because we just don’t feel like fighting anymore.
This is not to say that we can or should fight every single point or issue, which is a foolish notion from a strategic point of view regardless of the drain on our time and resources. I’ve written about this before, and it’s worth a second look. But when there is a real fight to be made for a client, we have no right to back away.
Fighting gets tiresome. It’s draining to find yourself constantly in the midst of battle. There’s a level of focus and intensity that has to be maintained to be successful in the fight, and even the best of us can find ourselves working at less than full speed. But what do we say to the client whose fight is lost because we didn’t give it our all? We’re sorry, but we gave some other guy a great fight? This doesn’t begin to cut it. Each client gets our all, and there’s just no other way to do this job.
My friend, Mr. Elected Official, has about a zillion potential fights available to him at any given moment. He can’t fight them all, at least not effectively, by definition. Even if he was able to maintain the level of focus and intensity needed to be constantly in a battle, he would find himself ineffective because he was constantly fighting. He would be perceived by other elected officials as a complainer and marginalized. They would stop paying attention to him, and he would squander his political capital. It’s a very different job than ours, and the dynamic works very differently.
But the downside of this very reasonable approach is that a lot of battles that needed to be fought were ignored. He knew things to be wrong, but chose to leave the battle to someone else. Most of the time, no one stepped up to the plate. I don’t know if Germany would have won World War II if they had left Russia alone and concentrated their effort on western Europe. I do know that if you happen to be one of the people affected by something that goes awry in government, and there’s no elected official willing to stand up and help, you feel like a foot soldier in the Russian army during the Battle of Stalingrad. Cold and alone. No client should feel that way.
This, of course, is a reference to the Germans losing World War II because they tried to fight a war on two fronts and were spread too thin. His use of this reference is to explain why, when confronted with all the things that can and do go wrong in the course of trying to run a government, he picks his battles. Usually, his references comes up after he’s told me about some new fiasco and I chide him on why he, Mr. Elected Official, doesn’t do something about it. This is when he usually regrets having brought up the subject.
It must be nice to be able to pick your battles in this way. Criminal defense lawyers rarely have this luxury. Every defendant has a battle to fight, and expects us to fight it. For private criminal defense lawyers, this may mean 10 or 20 battles at a time. For a public defender, this could mean 150 battles or more at any given moment. Every client believes that we are out there, fighting his battle. And that’s exactly what we are obliged to do. We can’t pick a few of our clients and fight their battles only, leaving the rest to dangle in the wind because we just don’t feel like fighting anymore.
This is not to say that we can or should fight every single point or issue, which is a foolish notion from a strategic point of view regardless of the drain on our time and resources. I’ve written about this before, and it’s worth a second look. But when there is a real fight to be made for a client, we have no right to back away.
Fighting gets tiresome. It’s draining to find yourself constantly in the midst of battle. There’s a level of focus and intensity that has to be maintained to be successful in the fight, and even the best of us can find ourselves working at less than full speed. But what do we say to the client whose fight is lost because we didn’t give it our all? We’re sorry, but we gave some other guy a great fight? This doesn’t begin to cut it. Each client gets our all, and there’s just no other way to do this job.
My friend, Mr. Elected Official, has about a zillion potential fights available to him at any given moment. He can’t fight them all, at least not effectively, by definition. Even if he was able to maintain the level of focus and intensity needed to be constantly in a battle, he would find himself ineffective because he was constantly fighting. He would be perceived by other elected officials as a complainer and marginalized. They would stop paying attention to him, and he would squander his political capital. It’s a very different job than ours, and the dynamic works very differently.
But the downside of this very reasonable approach is that a lot of battles that needed to be fought were ignored. He knew things to be wrong, but chose to leave the battle to someone else. Most of the time, no one stepped up to the plate. I don’t know if Germany would have won World War II if they had left Russia alone and concentrated their effort on western Europe. I do know that if you happen to be one of the people affected by something that goes awry in government, and there’s no elected official willing to stand up and help, you feel like a foot soldier in the Russian army during the Battle of Stalingrad. Cold and alone. No client should feel that way.
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