Nobody becomes a litigator because they love playing nice. They become litigators because they love to win. So when someone suggests that civility is a strategic advantage in the courtroom, the instinctive reaction from a lot of attorneys is somewhere between skepticism and outright dismissal.
That reaction is expensive. The attorneys who’ve spent decades in civil litigation will tell you the same thing, usually without prompting. The ones who mistake hostility for strength tend to burn credibility faster than they build it. With judges, with juries, with opposing counsel who’ll be sitting across the table from them again next year, and the year after that. The legal world is smaller than it looks from the outside.
What the most effective litigators understand is this: zealous advocacy and professionalism aren’t in competition with each other. They’re a package deal. The lawyer who grasps that early in their career has a head start that compounds over time in ways that are genuinely difficult to catch up to.
The Difference Between Fighting Hard and Fighting Dirty
There’s a version of tough lawyering that actually works. Then there’s a version that just feels tough while quietly undermining everything the client needs.
The difference isn’t aggression, it’s judgment. Zealous advocacy means pursuing every legitimate avenue available to a client with focus and conviction. It doesn’t mean picking unnecessary fights, responding to every provocation, or manufacturing conflict as a way of signaling commitment. Clients who believe their attorney is being aggressive on their behalf aren’t always right about what’s actually happening. Sometimes what looks like fighting hard is just fighting loud.
David Ruzumna, a seasoned Washington state attorney who’s been practicing civil litigation since 1997, has built his practice on the belief that zealous advocacy and professionalism not only can coexist but, practiced together, consistently produce better outcomes for clients. He’s not interested in the false choice between the two. In his view, the attorney who conflates rudeness with resolve is confusing their own temperament with their client’s interests.
That conflation has real consequences. Judges see through it quickly. Opposing counsel, particularly experienced opposing counsel, learns to use it. The attorney who can be baited into reactive, undisciplined behavior has handed leverage to the other side without realizing it. And juries, who spend days or weeks watching attorneys perform under pressure, register it in ways that are hard to quantify but very easy to feel in verdicts.
Effective advocacy requires knowing when to push, when to hold steady, and when making noise is actually making things worse.
Why the First Phone Call Changes Everything
Most attorneys wait. They file their first motion, stake out a position, and let the posturing begin. Ruzumna does the opposite. His habit, in any new case, is to contact opposing counsel as early as possible, not with a demand or a strategy signal, but with a simple introduction and a direct conversation about how the two of them are going to work together.
It sounds almost too simple to matter. It doesn’t feel that way once you’ve seen what happens without it.
When attorneys don’t establish early communication, small procedural disagreements calcify into contested motions. Discovery disputes that could’ve been resolved with a 15-minute conversation turn into filed briefs, judicial involvement, and billed hours that serve neither client. The adversarial baseline rises steadily, and by the time both parties are sitting across from each other in a deposition, the animosity has a life of its own.
Early communication between attorneys drains that dynamic before it builds. It puts a human voice behind the opposing party’s representation. It creates a shared understanding of working norms and it frequently surfaces information, about case timelines, scheduling constraints, settlement posture, that would otherwise only emerge after months of friction.
There’s no strategic downside to this. None. The attorney who refuses early communication on the grounds that it signals weakness has fundamentally misread what strength looks like to the people who actually decide these cases. Judges don’t want to referee matches between attorneys who couldn’t be bothered to talk to each other. They want attorneys who’ve already done the work of narrowing the real dispute.
What Composure Communicates in the Courtroom
Judges have long memories. They’ve watched attorneys throw tantrums over procedural scheduling, trade passive-aggressive volleys in court filings, and interrupt witnesses in ways that had nothing to do with the testimony and everything to do with performance. They’re not impressed by any of it and when they’re asked to rule on disputes that are really just two attorneys escalating at each other in writing, their patience doesn’t hold forever.
What composure signals to a judge is competence. It says: this attorney is in control of themselves, which means they’re probably in control of their case. That inference travels. It influences how much benefit of the doubt gets extended in close calls. It shapes how judicial frustration, when it surfaces, gets distributed between the parties.
The attorney who maintains professional conduct even when opposing counsel won’t has made a choice that serves their client. The attorney who matches aggression with aggression has made a choice that feels satisfying in the moment and costs them later.
For juries, the dynamic is more personal and arguably more powerful. Jurors aren’t evaluating legal arguments in the abstract. They’re evaluating the people making them. They watch how attorneys carry themselves when rulings go against them, how they treat witnesses they disagree with, whether they seem frustrated or composed when the day isn’t going their way. An attorney who can absorb a setback without showing it reads, to a jury, like someone who knows something. That perception has weight.
When Opposing Counsel Won’t Play Professionally
This is where the theory gets tested. It’s easy to be professional with opposing counsel who’s professional back. The harder version is staying steady when the other side has decided that aggression is their strategy.
Ruzumna’s read on this is blunt: unprofessional behavior by opposing counsel more often than not comes from insecurity, not strength. The attorney who sends inflammatory letters, escalates minor disputes, or peppers communications with personal digs is usually managing their own pressure poorly. That doesn’t make it less irritating but recognizing its source makes it easier to respond to without matching it.
His approach when facing unreasonable aggression is consistent. Respond firmly and courteously, on the record when appropriate. Then pick up the phone off the record to reset the tone. A direct conversation, away from the performance of formal correspondence, tends to reveal that the opposing attorney is a person dealing with pressures their client doesn’t know about and their filings don’t show. More often than not, the temperature drops.
What absolutely doesn’t work, he’s clear on this, is engaging in personal attacks or matching unprofessional aggression with unprofessional aggression. From his time serving as a judge pro tem in King County District Court and other Washington courts, he’s seen what those exchanges look like from the bench. They look like two attorneys who’ve lost the thread of their client’s actual interests and started fighting for themselves. Courts don’t reward that. They’re exhausted by it.
The only part of the opposing counsel equation an attorney can control is their own behavior. That’s the whole game. Attorneys who internalize this stop getting baited and start getting results.
Professionalism as a Long-Game Practice Strategy
Here’s what nobody talks about in law school: the legal community is a long relationship, not a series of one-off transactions. The opposing counsel on this case might be the co-counsel on the next one. The judge who watched an attorney grandstand in a hearing last spring still remembers it. The reputation built in the first decade of practice tends to follow an attorney into the next two or three.
This is why professionalism, consistently practiced, functions as a compounding advantage. It doesn’t pay off in any single case. It pays off across a career, in the form of credibility that travels, relationships that hold, and a reputation that opens doors rather than closing them.
David Ruzumna has been practicing since 1997. His experience is that the attorneys who lead with civility and early communication tend to resolve cases more efficiently and maintain the kind of client relationships that generate referrals and repeat work. The ones who build reputations for being difficult to deal with often win individual battles at the cost of the longer game.
His approach to clients reflects the same logic. From the beginning of any representation, he provides a candid assessment: the strengths, the weaknesses, the realistic range of outcomes, including the worst-case scenarios. Not to alarm anyone, but because clients who understand the full landscape from day one are steadier through the inevitable fluctuations of litigation.
Civility isn’t a concession to opposing counsel. It’s the discipline that makes hard fighting effective. The attorneys who understand that aren’t playing a different game than their more combative counterparts. They’re just playing it better.
