It was hard for me to say that I disagreed with you, because that has rarely (if ever?) been the case.

Let’s start with agreement. Client-to-client collaboration is becoming a reality. Legal OnRamp and perhaps in the future MarHub Connected offer an interesting paradigm shift of client to client communication. I rarely saw clients at bar functions or other typical lawyer social gatherings. I see few out there is the public web 2.0 world. But an online community may be able to be pulling them. Legal OnRamp seems to be working for that.

That may also change the dynamic of the lawyer-client relationship. we keep talking about it, but I am not sure there is much movement.

As for lawyer to lawyer, adversarial does not have to mean gladiator combat. It just means that they do not share the same objective.

You can’t be collaborative if you don’t have the same objective. At stages of a matter you may be less adversarial than others. A good transactional lawyer knows when it is time to collaborate and when it is time to be adversarial to push their client’s agenda. Both sides of a transaction want to close the deal, but each side has different objectives in getting to the closing and what happens after the closing.

I’m also not sure that no relationship between “opposing” counsel can be collaborative. Maybe it depends on how we define “opposing” — lawyers representing each side in a bitter litigation probably would qualify as fully “adversarial” and wouldn’t collaborate in the usual sense, although there are still factors such as professionalism (the courtesy of finding mutually acceptable dates) and e-discovery standards (I think meet-and-confer really will make a big difference in this regard) that would play a role. But I also would submit that truly “adversarial” lawyer relationships aren’t the norm. Lawyers on opposite sides of a transaction, for instance, will always have to collaborate to a certain degree, and to the extent various tools enable that process, that’s a good thing.

I think there are degrees of “collaboration” — it doesn’t need to include waivers of privilege or abandonment of client interests. I think you can collaborate with the lawyer representing “the other side” without giving away the farm in the process. But that will be a new habit for many lawyers to acquire, and perhaps will require a reconsideration of how our ethical codes instruct us to treat counsel representing other parties.

I would certainly agree that the way lawyers have traditionally treated clients could be categorized as competitive, as well as patronizing or adversarial. But I’m not ready to say lawyers can’t collaborate with clients at all — if that is the case, in fact, lawyers will be extinct before too long, because collaboration is on its way to becoming a cultural norm. To the extent lawyers and clients have not collaborated well, I think the blame can be placed on the fact that the financial interests of lawyers and clients are usually in direct opposition: clients profit from quick resolution, lawyers from the opposite. So L2C collaboration will pick up speed at roughly the same rate that hourly billing crumbles away.

I do think that C2C is the most important of these developments, though, and it’s really what I wanted to talk about in this post. Collaboration that involves lawyers is essentially about instilling greater efficiency and satisfaction into the legal services delivery process. Collaboration that does not involve lawyers is a disruptive event that has the power to completely undermine the profession as we know it.

I don’t agree with your categorization. Those are the type of relationships, but not the type of collaboration.

I wrote a bit about this on on KM space through the lens of documents. In particular I found the comparison of wikis and document management systems to be illustrative of collaboration behaviors.

http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2008/04/document-behaviors.html
http://kmspace.blogspot.com/2008/09/wikis-and-document-management-systems.html

The dynamic of lawyer to lawyer is very different depending on whether they are in the same firm or opposing counsel. Even in the same firm, the collaboration between an associate and a partner is very different than between a partner and a partner. For opposing counsel, there is not really collaboration because their clients want different things. It is hard to collaborate when you are in an adversarial position.

I also don’t think there is really collaboration between clients and lawyers. (This is perhaps a more cynical view.) it is a bit more a competitive relationship.

I have to admit, I had not given much thought to the client to client collaboration. Not that I am a “client” there are some new relationships to think about.