Between them, Boies Schiller Flexner's Stephen Zack and Stroock & Stroock & Lavan's Shira Scheindlin have nearly a century's worth of experience in the law. And after all those years, they have both grown concerned in recent years about the state of civility in the profession.

As Scheindlin said in accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award last week at The American Lawyer Industry Awards in New York, she is worried about the "dangerously increasing lack of civility, which I assure you is not a partisan issue."