Stuart M. Speiser, Sarbanes-Oxley and the Myth of the Lawyer-statesman, ABA Litigation, Fall, 2005:
[According to]the timeworn phrase attributed to Elihu Root--"About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop."
[The suggestion of those who quote the comment is that] the leading lawyers of [the] golden age actually would have told crooked clients they were damned fools. The Root saga originated in the two-volume authorized biography of him written by Professor Philip Jessup, in which the author laid out the full story, which is invariably downsized when repeated:
“[Root] was still pre-eminently a trial lawyer, but he was already wise in consultation and constantly adhered to the principle which he expressed years afterward in private conversation, as he had suggested it to the Havemeyer Sugar Refining Company in 1882, that ‘of course a lawyer's chief business is to keep his clients out of litigation.’ Or, as he phrased it on another occasion: ‘About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.’” 1 Elihu Root 132-33 (1938).
Thus it is clear from the unedited Jessup account that Root was talking about the need to keep big business clients (like the Havemeyers, "lords of the sugar trust") out of litigation whenever possible, not because it was in the public interest but because it was in the clients' interest to avoid the exposure of their internal affairs that was a frequent side effect of litigation. Root practiced in an era when virtually no corporate disclosure to anyone was required, and, therefore, the private interests of corporate insiders were best served by avoiding litigation whenever possible. Root never mentioned to Jessup or anyone else the high-minded concept of lecturing a client on the public interest. He told his clients they "should stop" when they were headed for the transparency of litigation, not when he felt they were acting against the public interest.
Another difficulty with [the typical] use of the downsized Root anecdote is that Root was the lawyer of choice for the likes of John D. Rockefeller, William Marcy (Boss) Tweed, Jay Gould, and Jim Fiske. [He was therefore] a veritable poster boy for the "lawyer sidekicks of the robber barons" [because of his] collaboration with the worst of the business scoundrels.
The motto of the day seemed to be another old saying attributed to Elihu Root: "The client never wants to be told he can't do what he wants to do; he wants to be told how to do it, and it is the lawyer's business to tell him how."