Even in big cities, the "commercial bar" -- the group of lawyerswho regularly do transactional work in a particular field, such asreal estate -- often know each other pretty well, by reputation andexperience. After you've been negotiating loan agreements orwriting leases for a decade or two, you get to know a bit about theother regular players in your region. You hear thatLarry or Curly is going to be opposite you, in a lease negotiation,and you already know, more or less, that you're going to have along negotiation -- or a short one; that counsel knows their stuffand can argue efficiently –– or not; and so on.

Lawyers may not always be able to convey the full story to theirclients about these things. For one thing, obviously, there'ssome degree of professional competition, so clients sometimes mayneed to discount what lawyers say about each other. Even ourself-consciously stately profession occasionally sees a little"trash talk," like you hear between football teams sometimes.

On the other hand, in my experience, lawyers are usuallyreluctant to offer information about other lawyers unless expresslyasked. Some of this is basic politeness; some is the idea,common in the profession, that lawyers should offer their thoughtsonly on narrowly defined technical legal issues. In addition,some clients tend to hire their lawyers on the basis of oldrelationships, or who their owners or partners require them to use,or other soft factors -- in which case there may be little point intalking about the relative merits of opposing counsel. So wesmile and do the best we can with Larry or Curly.