It is easy for lawyers to forget that while they live in the legal environment all year, clients do not. A client, including an in-house lawyer, gives a project to a law firm out of necessity, with a commercial motive. But it would be an error to assume that motivation is a steady state. Your client's motivation levels are not fixed, and neither are those of the counter-party.

Whether the motive is to acquire a business, defend a product or teach a lesson to an infringer, the corporate appetite for any legal project can vary as time passes and events unfold. And guess which way this usually trends. Correct, this variance is usually negative; client motivation tends to wane. It's a phenomenon that I call 'motivation melt.' I don't care how adrenalized the client is on Day One of the project, I guarantee that six months later the enthusiasm level will have faded. Maybe not in criminal work or divorce, neither of which I have ever done, but in commercial legal work, motivation melts with the passage of time.

We often see lawsuits being successfully defended or at least compromised on favorable terms, not on the technical merits, but because parties become demotivated. The longer the process takes, the more it costs, and the less tangible progress the party can see, the more the parties' motivation will evaporate. And this matters, because the client who gives up or accepts a mediocre deal has a vulnerable lawyer.