It cannot be true, however, that they have little or no confidence in their own lawyer; they hired him or her and would not have done so if they positively had no confidence in him or her. In any event it is probably misleading to use the term “confidence” in this context, something many clients would probably recognize intuitively. The emotion felt is probably closer to hope than anything else, or, in the case of very inexperienced clients, expectation. “Confidence” is something based on past experience; most clients have little experience of the legal system. What of a client accused of the offence of dangerous driving? How can his/her emotional state be said to be one of “confidence”, when the most positive outcome may, to the knowledge of the client, be one where public humiliation is attenuated by the lawyer speaking for the client, rather than snatching an acquittal from the situation?
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