Stephen Zack of Boies Schiller Flexner at The American Lawyer Industry Awards 2019 dinner, held at The Roosevelt in New York, on Dec. 4, 2019. Credit: Jack McCoy Photography.

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."

Zack, whose family emigrated from Cuba, said he keeps a copy of the U.S. Constitution in both English and Spanish on his desk, "to recognize that we have a very special obligation as attorneys to protect those rights that can so easily go away."

And at a time when partisan politics have drained the country—and the practice of law—of some of its civility, he said, it's important to remember that "we may be in a war of ideas, but we cannot be in a war with each other."