I’ve been doing this work for a long time. There were some family law things that I knew with absolute certainty years ago that I sometimes think I’ve forgotten. These are things that we take for granted. They are the things that really matter, but they’re so small that they don’t seem all that important.
Unfortunately, these little things probably are the most important things we need to know and remember about family law. We need to push them to the forefront of our minds rather than letting them drift away.
The first of the five things is the importance of the initial call to your office. A prospective client calling your office for the first time to arrange an appointment is making what is, for them, one of the single most important decisions they’ll ever make. They’re calling you to end their marriage. It wasn’t that long ago that they stood before a crowd of people and said their vows to one another. Now they’re making one of the most difficult calls of their life. They’re trusting that call to you and your office. It’s essential that we remember the importance of the moment and that we treat each of those calls with the dignity and honor that it deserves. For you, this is a moment that will barely make an impression. For our clients, this is a moment that they may remember forever.
Next, we’ve got to remember that clients leaving voicemail messages or sending e-mails are waiting for the response. They’re sitting by the phone hoping that it will ring. They are watching the e-mail on the computer and hitting the refresh button hoping to receive your reply. To them, their question is the most important question ever asked. It is essential that you remember that they are waiting for the response so that you will treat your efforts to respond as a high priority.
The third thing that we forget is that the important things to a client are the things they can understand. If they don’t understand something, it doesn’t really matter to them. So, for many clients, the misspelling of their name or their children’s names are far more important than ensuring that you get the terminology in a pleading done properly. It might be the failure to insert something in an envelope that matters. It might be the call you made on Tuesday after promising to make it on Monday. The things they understand are the things they care about.
The fourth thing that matters to clients that we sometimes forget is that they need you to be on their side. When you take time and ask them to see things from the other side’s perspective, they don’t always feel like you understand their side. Just asking a client to see things from their spouse’s perspective sometimes feels like abandonment. Of course, it’s valuable to help clients see all sides of every situation. But you can’t do it until you build up a balance in the emotional bank account of your relationship. You need to have made many deposits and built up a high balance before you can spend some of that emotion by asking the client to see things from the other spouse’s perspective. Make sure you have a solid relationship with your client before you ever explain things from their spouse’s standpoint.
Finally, remember that a key component of your relationship with your client is the client’s perception of how much you care. That perception is largely measured by how proactive you are about your relationship. When you call the client to give a status update, the client feels cared about because you initiated the call. When the client has called you for a status update and you’re reacting to his or her stimulus, you get far less credit for your response. Realistically, giving a status update, whether done proactively or reactively, costs you the same amount of time and energy, but you get more points for being proactive. Don’t wait for the client to come to you making a request. Be proactive about everything from status updates to strategy sessions to developing plans about the case.
It’s easy to become distracted by the challenges we face in practice every day. However, these fundamentals keep us in good stead with our clients. Stay focused on the basics, don’t let them slip from your memory, and you’ll have happy clients and plenty of word-of-mouth referrals.
