This is a composite, illustrative situation built from patterns that recur across many cases. It is not an account of any specific, real case, and it is not a prediction of how any other case will turn out.
Partway through a divorce, a spouse's attorney identified a small, disputed retirement account from early in the marriage. The attorney proposed a formal discovery request, interrogatories and a request for account statements going back several years, to establish exactly how much of the account was separate property and how much was marital. The client's reaction was that the account was small enough that the legal fees to fight over it would likely exceed whatever additional amount was actually at stake.
What the disagreement actually turned on
On its face, this looked like a dispute about strategy, something Model Rule 1.2 generally treats as the attorney's call. But the underlying disagreement was really about objectives and cost tolerance, which the same rule identifies as the client's to decide. The attorney's professional judgment was accurate on its own terms: without discovery, the marital share of the account would be difficult to establish with confidence, and an imprecise number could work against the client later. What the attorney had not yet done was quantify that judgment in terms the client could weigh, roughly how many hours of work the discovery would take, at what hourly cost, against a rough estimate of what was actually in dispute.
How it was resolved
Once the attorney provided a written estimate, covering both the discovery's cost and the plausible range of dollars actually at stake in the account, the client had what was actually a cost-benefit decision, not a legal-strategy decision. The client chose a narrower request: a single subpoena for account statements rather than full interrogatories, which cost less and still produced enough documentation to resolve the dispute. The attorney's strategic judgment (what would establish the facts) and the client's objective-setting authority (how much that was worth pursuing) turned out to be compatible once they were separated out explicitly, rather than argued about as if only one of them could be right.
The pattern worth noticing
Disagreements framed as "the attorney wants to do X and I don't" are often, on closer examination, a mismatch between a technical judgment (which is generally the attorney's to make) and a cost or objectives judgment (which is generally the client's). Making that distinction explicit, asking directly what a proposed step is expected to accomplish and what it will cost to get there, is a question any licensed attorney should be able to answer for a specific, real case.