Unlike buses or taxicabs, attorneys don’t have to take every new client that contacts them. The best lawyers are often the busiest, and are therefore more selective on the clients they choose to represent. We have given advice on how to pick a lawyer, but here are some tips to get a lawyer to pick you:
How you make contact can be important.
Even before the pandemic, in-person meetings with new clients were rare, and now they are almost non-existent. Most clients call my office first, after they decide that my firm may be a good fit for them. This first contact is important for many reasons. First, we pick up vocal cues that tell us a lot about the person calling- are they yelling and angry, do they listen and allow responses back? I always prefer a new client phone call.
Emails and the occasional letter are also common, but unless they are a prelude to a phone call, they are horrible ways to contact a law firm. Besides the uncertainty as to whether your email got to the right person, few lawyers will give detailed responses in an email. Part of this is due to protecting a client’s confidentiality, but an email exchange takes many times longer than a phone call to give complete advice.
Just the facts.
Whether on the phone or in an email, some clients try to tell a two or three-year ordeal in a several-hour-long phone call. Few lawyers have hours to discuss a new case before the client has even hired them. The format that journalists follow, telling the who, what, when, where, and why for your contact, in a brief matter, is more apt to help you get the attorney you want.
A client who tells me the basics and leaves it to me to ask questions shows that they respect my time and they trust me to get the facts I need to evaluate a case. If we ask for a slice of bread, we don’t expect the history of wheat and the history of your injury may go back to before the time you got hurt, but not often. Keeping your story short gives you more time to interact with the lawyer and get a feel for whether you will be a good fit with their practice.
Save the Drama for your mama…
I occasionally get emails or phone calls from people who “have a story to tell” and they do so with lavish detail. Because most people are not good writers, this can be tedious for the reader. They tend to overstate their case, like men who say their pain was worse than childbirth, or someone who calls a relatively minor car crash the worst thing that ever happened to them.
It is difficult to follow a long story that doesn’t get to the point. Potential clients may think that it is critical to get in all the details and that is partially true- it is critical to tell all the important details. The name and address of the restaurant where you fell is important, what you planned to have for dinner probably isn’t.
French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time, and it does take longer to write an email that gets to the point than one that wanders. If you want to hire a good lawyer, you are looking for a busy lawyer and a busy lawyer may not get through a meandering story as fast as you might like.