Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Your attorneys might think you're being unreasonable, and your relationship with them might suffer.

The lawyer gets frustrated. That's all!

Now to expand that a little from experience:

As an attorney, I am there as a servant to my client. The client is the boss. Some clients want to be intimately involved in their case. Some view the attorneys office as a place to dump their problem and run and thereafter I have to chase them to get answers and do a good job. There are lots of kinds of clients, some of which I appreciate more than others. In regard to settlements, what is "reasonable" is sometimes a personal choice. It is also influenced by the client's personality, e.g. whether they are a business or an emotional decision maker. In a few rare instances, it is clear from my attorney's chair that the client is making a horrible decision by turning down a settlement. That's time for a relationship evaluation! Why? Because their inability to see what a bad decision it is means they are so emotionally escalated that they are unreasonable and I have failed to help that situation, or that I have not done a good job of communicating, or they have ulterior motives, or something else that isn't making sense to me. At that point, I have to ask myself whether I am capable of achieving a satisfactory outcome in that case. In the most extreme cases, the client may decide they want to change attorneys or I might want to withdraw as counsel. (I can recall only one case in twenty years where there was such an extreme problem with a client.) In most cases, the attorney sees this as a signal that they need more information regarding why the settlement offer was not reasonable in the client's view to start working on Plan B.