Mahatma Gandhi practiced law in South Africa from 1893. In one of his first cases, he persuaded the two parties to take their dispute to an arbitrator and settle it. He wrote that he had realized “the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.”
“This lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases.”