... but your relationship with counsel shouldn’t be

 A few years ago your editor had a case with an attorney with whom she had not previously had a case. Our communications, started off very adversarial, if not positively acrimonious, and then deteriorated further. The attorney was busy and it was his practice to have his assistant take messages, and return the call to opposing counsel. Your editor finally insisted that she be put through to speak to the attorney “face-to-face” as it were. Your editor expressed concern over the tenor of the communications and denied making several of the more inflammatory statements attributed to her…plaintiff’s attorney and your editor we realized our respective messages had been mis-quoted, and we identified the assistant as the problem. Thereafter your editor and the plaintiff’s attorney got along quite well and settled the case to our mutual satisfaction (sometimes it does happen that both sides believe they got a good deal).