At a seminar I attended years ago, a smart lawyer instructed that “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable” is a key element to success as a lawyer. The skill is never mastered completely. Without being comfortable in difficult meetings, the lawyer may not be much help to the client.
Besides sleeping and eating well and exercising before a tough meeting, knowing the tricks of a difficult adversary can ease stress for the lawyer and the client.
A meeting with a tough adversary usually has a pattern. The adversary will be late or accuse you of being late, even if you were not. They will offer little information and criticize your information. They will set up straw man issues and then either knock them down or threaten to use them. They will tell you that they do not have a lot of time to devote to the meeting as soon as you walk in the door.
They will always accept or arrange interruptions – something is always more important than your meeting. Often emergencies of a personal nature, such as a doctor on the telephone, will pop up at productive points in the meeting. They will text and email in the middle of a thought or while you are in the middle of answering a question they posed.
As the meeting winds down, the tough adversary will lament the lack of progress made – revisit the straw man or your failure to provide some minor piece of information, just in case you forgot that the meeting failed because of you.
The tough adversary can be managed and channeled but rarely cured. The key is to never take the bait and demonstrate that you are aggravated by the tricks. Let the tough adversary tire out and then be ready to present a range of reasonable options to select from. Ensure that each of the options includes credit for the hard work and skill employed by the tough adversary and agree to accept some “blame” for whatever you supposedly did or did not do wrong – it doesn’t really matter as long as you achieve your goals.