If you’ve been practicing family law for more than 20 minutes, you know that some clients are challenging. They’re unpleasant and annoying, and they won’t leave you alone. They are the reason that some lawyers move on to other practice areas.
Our quest today is to find some technology tools that soothe the savage client. Is there a technological cure to the problem you face when a client is driving you crazy?
While we can’t easily transform difficult clients into cooperative, pleasant clients, we can take some steps to manage the impact of difficult clients’ behavior. I’m not sure that we can change these clients, but we can do some things to divert their energy toward solving their problems. We can keep them busy managing their lives so they aren’t so actively engaged in disrupting ours.
Technology offers you the opportunity to put these clients to work on their own behalf. The Web offers a multitude of tools that can help clients organize their thoughts, property, and finances. Using these tools requires a great deal of attention and focus on the clients’ part. Hopefully, directing that attention toward the tools and the work required will give you the time and space you need to get the job done.
Get Them Busy on a Diary
Difficult clients usually like to talk about one thing more than anything else: themselves. They’re usually more than willing to explain in great detail the impact—on themselves—of everything that has ever happened. That’s great. It takes a long, long time to explain everything, so put them to work writing it down.
Penzu is a free private diary. It provides your clients with a place to create a long biography explaining the entire history of the marriage. Your difficult clients can write until they run out of gas, and once they’ve finished their history, they can organize it with a full set of searching, sorting, renaming, and filtering tools. They’ll be able to create a narrative that actually puts their energy to use when you skim it and turn it into trial testimony.
Penzu is truly private. It’s not a blogging or publishing platform. Having your clients write privately beats the heck out of letting them emote in public on Facebook or Twitter. If your clients are totally paranoid about absolute privacy, have them sign up for a paid, professional account ($19 per year), which offers military-grade security.
When your clients are ready to share their story with you, the site allows them to send the content via e-mail. Penzu even allows visitors (like you) to comment on posts that have been shared. A Penzu diary should keep your clients busy for weeks and weeks.
Have Them Inventory Their Property
You’re going to need an inventory, and it’s painful and tedious to list all the personal property your difficult clients own. Again, put them to work. iKeepm is a free site that makes creating a household inventory easy. The site is cloud-based and secure, and it organizes the inventory room by room. Once your clients have entered the items, it’s simple for them to create reports and forward them to your team.
An alternative to iKeepm is OwnDepot, which offers a similar service but, for an additional fee, offers to do the inventory for clients. While that won’t keep your clients busy and out of your hair, it might be a useful service in some cases. OwnDepot started as an aid for making comprehensive insurance claims in the event of a loss but is now marketing its services to family law clients.
Get Them Busy Figuring Out Their Finances
Mint is an amazingly powerful, free site for organizing personal finances. It’s quick, easy, and intuitive, and it’s run by Intuit (the company that created Quicken). Mint replaced Quicken Online and is a robust tool for aggregating financial information.
Mint will allow your clients to enter all their financial accounts into the system. When clients enter the username and password for their bank account, for instance, Mint grabs all the data and pulls it into the system. It does the same for credit cards, mortgages, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, and just about any other financial account clients might own.
The data is aggregated, making it easy for you and your clients to generate reports about where the money has been going. Beyond that, your clients can use the data and the automated system for developing a post-marital budget. The categorization and budgeting tools are easy to use and quite powerful. Clients can create graphs and charts within Mint, and they can take complete control of their personal finances with built-in alerts and notifications.
The only downside to turning clients on to Mint is that it’s almost too easy to use. It’s so automated and fast that it won’t divert your clients’ attention for long. However, it will give them, and you, a clear sense of the family’s financial situation. Mint is a mature product, and Intuit makes mobile applications available for every platform. Your clients will appreciate it if you push them to organize their finances.
Mint makes its money by advertising and selling additional services to users. The service looks at the clients’ financial information and figures out how its advertisers can save the users money. For instance, the site takes note of a mortgage interest rate and offers users an opportunity to refinance at a better rate. The service is pretty helpful for finding savings that might help your clients in the long run.
Meditation Will Calm Them Down
Study after study proves the value and benefits of meditation. It helps your clients, and, if they’re meditating, it will help you. It’s tough for clients to call you when they’re in a trance.
Suggesting meditation feels weird at first. Of course, it’s actually easier to suggest meditation than to suggest counseling (which we all do frequently). Meditation requires no technology at all, but clients are more likely to follow your suggestion if you give them an easy path to follow. That’s where meditation apps for smartphones come into the picture.
A multitude of guided meditation applications and fancy meditation timers are available for each type of smartphone. A quick search of the iPhone App Store or Android Marketplace will reveal dozens of applications ranked by popularity. They’re all good if they keep your clients off the phone and out of your office. I truly believe that clients who meditate are, in fact, calmer and easier to deal with when they are in the office.
Maybe You Can Put Them to Sleep
Many divorcing clients aren’t getting enough sleep. They suffer from insomnia as a result of the stress and anxiety inherent in the process. When clients aren’t sleeping, they’re doomed to make bad decisions. You need to get them some shuteye.
Pzizz offers a solution, and it really works. I’ve used it myself, and this software will knock you out. Pzizz is an application that runs on iPhones, Androids, PCs, and Macs. Depending on which package you purchase, the price ranges from $5 to $90. Pzizz provides a soundtrack, customized with each delivery, that talks you into a deep sleep. Couple Pzizz with a set of headphones from SleepPhones, and you’ll have your clients sleeping like babies.
These tools won’t turn all difficult clients into perfect clients. They won’t transform a personality. However, they are more than a diversion that keeps your clients busy. They do more than keep your clients off your phone.
Each of these tools gives your clients a sense of control. A diary, an inventory, and a grasp of family finances give clients a perspective on life that they may not have had before. For years, they’ve been bogged down in the details of the argument of the moment. You’ve forced them to take a 30,000-foot overview of their life with these activities and assignments. You’ve given them the tools they need to reflect on their current situation and begin to see a path to the situation they’re moving toward.
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By helping your clients better manage stress and sleep, you’re enabling them to make better decisions and better serve as a partner to you in the managing the divorce. They’ll appreciate your concern, ideas, and commitment to helping them through the process.
Technology can make life with difficult clients easier. The key is having the resources ready for you to pass along when the need arises. Suggest these tools to your clients, and you’ll make their life better as well as yours.
This article originally appeared in Family Advocate, a publication of the American Bar Association Family Law Section.
