This became particularly important for Mr Kalantar after he dealt with an especially difficult client.

“They weren’t a nice person. They just were not a nice person. They were selfish, entitled, et cetera. Now, after I fought like a tiger and got them a really good outcome, they essentially backstabbed me. They refused to pay the bill. They went to a different lawyer and slammed me to the profession. They just did a bunch of stuff that really was not nice,” he said.

“I kind of reflected on my journey as a lawyer and I’ve done this almost a decade now, but certainly the first year or two, I would’ve absolutely taken them back because I didn’t know any better. And so certainly this particular client, I don’t think would’ve listened to advice.

“You’ve got to make sure you follow your professional obligations in relation to that. As I told them, I’m not in the position to help them. And that’s probably where I felt the most proud of developing my own voice because it’s really hard to tell people that you are not going to work with them when they’re basically begging you to do so. So that really resonated with me.”

Mr Kalantar has had a number of clients he’s had to stand up to – many of which, he said, didn’t respond well initially.

“Some of them really have not been told no sufficiently in life and so they have what is akin to a tantrum. Others of them try to manipulate you psychologically or they cry. It’s hard. It’s really hard if you’re a person, a people-pleaser or somebody who wants to be of service, and I don’t think you can be a great lawyer if you don’t really want to be of service to people, you want to help everyone,” he added.

“You don’t want to leave people feeling worse than when they came in. That’s certainly never been my objective, but anything I’ve ever done in life. But the reality is that some people can’t be helped, and if they can be helped, it wouldn’t be helped by me.”

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But as a firm leader, standing up to these clients is also a means of protecting his staff, according to Mr Kalantar.

“We have a rule, we’ve got a few rules that are really good for mental health at EL, but one of them is, we don’t want to work with people that are unreasonable, that are mean, that are rude. I won’t let a client yell at me. That’s just a line in the sand,” he explained.

“If somebody raises their voice to me, I say, ‘You’re raising your voice to me now. You continue to do so, I won’t act for you any further, so please bring it down.’ And if they can’t control themselves, they’ve made the decision not to work with me. I’m entitled to go through my day without being yelled at.”

Executive Legal also has a few rules in place to protect its lawyers’ mental health and overall sanity.

“If you get into a case and it’s really starting to affect you psychologically, you are allowed to move that onto someone else. And that happens, some of the matters that we deal with and the types we deal with, or even the people we deal with, it’s not good to have someone in that space the whole time, and we make clients aware of that.

“We have something where if we’ve had a really bad experience in court or a very good experience in court, we insist that people go for a walk around the block just to clear their heads, because otherwise they’re going to behave in a manner that is unprofessional or manic, and they’re going to make decisions that aren’t good. And it’s understanding that we are these hyper complicated, we’re running the latest version of software on really basic biological systems. So, it’s about developing that resilience and that voice,” Mr Kalantar said.

“And I think that it’s so important to understand that you are a human being first and a lawyer second. And it doesn’t matter if you are at the cream of the crop litigation firm, at the big end of town, or you’re a sole practitioner. You’re a human being first. Human beings don’t and should not be yelled at or mistreated.”

In terms of when to draw that line in the sand with clients, Mr Kalantar said it could be a fairly tricky, albeit important, thing to get right.

“I think that it’s a balancing act that certainly I haven’t mastered. And I don’t think even the most senior QC has mastered it. But what you need to do is if you are the type of person who wakes up hungry for a fight, you need to learn to temper [that] and if you’re the kind of person who shies away from one, you need to temper that as well,” he added.

“It’s about engaging in constructive conflict to move the situation forward. It’s certainly not about engaging in conflict for the sake of conflict, and for those of us who like to avoid conflict, and I count myself amongst that, conflict avoided is often called conflict multiplied. It makes it far, far worse to avoid that conversation than it does to deal with it. So, if you don’t like conflict, make sure that you have it as soon as you can and in the most meaningful way that you can.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Jahan Kalantar, click below: