When you find yourself without a good argument, getting frustrated with the person you can’t convince without him bringing in disputed facts, don’t lower yourself to the ad hominem attack “you’re being a lawyer, this isn’t a trial, or a prosecution and don’t try to turn this into an inquisition, I won’t let you put me on trial, I’m not the one on trial here.”  Understandable though it may be to react this way when you feel cornered, it doesn’t help your case and it makes you look bad.

Especially when you deploy it against a reluctant and underpaid former lawyer who hated the idiotic adversarial system and was drawn to problem-solving and compromise every time over zero-sum trial by adversarial combat. 

Look at the parade of ever more marginal lying scumbags who continue to bring a flotilla of frivolous, legally incoherent, evidence-free claims on behalf of a vindictive, lying sociopath and his pernicious disinformation machine.  Those lawyers are behaving as we expect the accursed stereotype of the “anything for a dollar,” or an intoxicating whiff of power, lawyers to act. 

That the licenses of these lying mercenary dicks were not immediately yanked by the legal profession is another proof of the moral idiocy of an adversarial system in which a lawyer/client can use the courts strictly for delay, expense and vexation, with no consequence to themselves. They can justify anything he or his client can imagine might, in some world, not be, technically, an outright transactional lie fraudulently presented to the court in a way that would risk their law license. Satan is often depicted as a lawyer in a very expensive suit.

So when you are about to complain, when your side of argument loses sight of the agreed facts, take a breath instead of playing the lawyer card a lawyer to assert it’s unfair, and frustrating to argue with someone trained in the martial art of law. Stop and consider: isn’t this really a good time to take a breath and pause, let the hot emotion cool a bit? Isn’t that deep breath a much better alternative to possibly insulting a friend and making them antagonistic in return?  

Short answer:  yes.