You have a duty to your client to use the appropriate forum for their particular dispute. How do you protect your client, and yourself, in this regard? By advising your client to try An Olive Branch before, or during, the lawsuit or other dispute resolution process you are handling for them.

Why? Because in our adversarial system there is one aspect of your valuable dispute resolution assistance that is often under-appreciated, both by you and by your client, and that is the very concept of 'resolution' itself.

When deciding what forum or redress to pursue for your client, one of the first questions you must answer is: does my client want a simple 'conclusion' to their case regardless of the relations between all stakeholders with an interest in the outcome, or does a 'resolution' require the cost of the likely impact on those relations to be assessed and efforts made to maintain them as part of the process or ultimate outcome? 

If the latter, then you must consider An Olive Branch before or during a lawsuit. Failing to adequately explore and address this question may expose you to being sued by your own client simply because your choice of forum or process was not appropriate to achieve the outcome desired by your client. 

Your client could allege that, in your choice of filing a lawsuit, no proper instructions were taken on the nature, relevance and financial significance of the relations between the parties and interested stakeholders before the conflict arose, or to the reasonably foreseeable consequences thereto, and to your client’s business, during or after your chosen conflict resolution process itself.

Adversarial, or similar interrogatory, legal processes are designed to pitch each side against the other. The inevitable damage to any business and/or personal relations that the stakeholders might have had is all too often treated as incidental, or the full consequences are not adequately considered or appreciated until afterwards when it is usually too late. 

Even when you succeed in getting an award or settlement for your client, their 'win' may be outweighed by the fact that the choice of process itself served to add further conflict to an existing dispute where it was reasonably foreseeable that it would cause irreparable damage to core relations and overall business efficiency where those parties must or wish to continue to interact and/or transact afterwards.

Accordingly, where ongoing relations between the disputing parties is one of the desired objectives or outcomes of your client's case, there is a duty on you to direct them to use an appropriately chosen process that will specifically focus on protecting this as much as practicable during that process. An Olive Branch does this.

All litigation involves at least two disputing parties. Sometimes your client might not even be one of them. A stakeholder independent of the cause of the conflict, for example, such as when a business client of yours comes to you because they have two or more staff in conflict with each other. Either way, your client wants you to get a 'result' that favours them. That's your sole concern and responsibility.

What your client also wants, and often needs, is as early and inexpensive a conclusion as possible to protect their financial wellbeing by minimising the possible fallout. 

You can use An Olive Branch in all cases.