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Call me, call me the moment, the moment you get there

By Jennifer Rice, Esq.

When we first meet with new clients who are hiring us, we try to give clients an idea of how best to communicate with us and how fast they can expect a response or a phone call back. I try to tell clients that we try, try to call you back within 24-48 hours.

We typically get 20-30 voice mails a day, 20-30 emails and 5-10 pieces of mail, and several faxes. It is hard to prioritze all of the volumes of information. Sometimes it is the clients that call repeatedly that catch us in between appointments or the clients that try to communicate in several different ways (email and voice mail) that get a response faster.

Sometimes clients do not understand what a typical day or types of typical days we have in the office. A typical court/meeting filled day might be 9AM client meeting 10AM status conference 11:30 AM meeting (which runs over lunch) 1PM telephone conference 2PM client meeting to prepare for a hearing (which lasts 3 hours). What you don't see is my legal assistant instant messaging me several times a day trying to get answers to client questions so she can try to call them back, while I'm still in a meeting. The other thing that happens is that my assistant taps on the door, interrupts my meeting and shoves papers under my nose that I have to sign today.
So how do you communicate effectively with your lawyer? Call, leave a voice mail, leave on the voice mail your name, contact number, best time to reach you, and your question. You have a much better chance of getting a quicker call back if someone can look up the answer to your question before they call you back rather than calling you back to find out what piece of information you wanted to know. If you have a long involved question or just want to go through lots of questions, just leave a message that says I want an appointment this week for an hour, etc.

This is not an excuse for your attorney not sending you all of the communication on your case or dropping off the face of the earth for several months without telling you what the status of your case. Just understand that it may be at least 24-48 hours for us to call you back.

Full post as published by Colorado Family Law Blog on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).