In some industries, your main goal is to keep customers coming back as many times as possible by consistently delivering a product that meets their expectations at a price they can afford. If the proprietors of ice cream parlors had their way, everyone in town would stop by for an ice cream cone after lunch and dinner every day, even over the loud protestations of their doctors and dentists. Their goal is to get the public hooked on ice cream. Even if it were possible to get the public hooked on divorce, it would be unethical. Only the wealthiest and most difficult to get along with people hire the same divorce lawyer multiple times in rapid succession, and people who dump their spouses at the drop of a hat are likely to do the same with divorce lawyers, anyway. Despite this, it is essential for family law attorneys to build trust and camaraderie with their clients so that, even though the experience of divorce is invariably painful, the clients will remember the attorney-client relationship as a beneficial one.
Be Responsive, Even When Clients Annoy You
It is an endless source of entertainment to talk to your colleagues about the annoying clients you have represented in vague enough terms that you do not breach attorney-client confidentiality, of course, but everyone knows that the worst client who can walk through the door of a law firm is Nobody. As a matter of course, people are at their worst when they need and engage the services of family lawyers. When clients are overly worried or when they have a chip on your shoulder, sometimes you just have to let them finish what they are saying and then refocus the conversation on the matter at hand. Use your professional judgment about when to talk clients out of their unreasonable requests and when to tell them outright that the attorney-client relationship is not working and you do not want to waste any more of their money or your time.
You can argue vociferously with clients and even politely end the relationship, but what you cannot do is be unprofessional. Do not ghost your clients or leave them hanging until the day before a hearing. This requires magisterial time management skills, but do not take on cases that you cannot handle.
Set Boundaries Regarding Client Communication to Avoid Burnout
Responding promptly to questions and requests from clients is an important part of professionalism, but you need some moments in your week when you are not at the beck and call of clients, even though, realistically speaking, you need to spend more than 40 hours per week on work. During the first consultation, let clients know what to expect when communicating with you. For example, let them know that you spend the 8:00 hour every morning responding to the previous night’s text messages and emails from clients. Outsourcing some of the communication to staff members or even bots could also ease the burden. For example, you can hire an answering service to answer clients’ calls after hours, like some physicians do. You can even borrow a page from the playbook of parents who have gone through high-conflict divorce and keep a file of prewritten messages that you can send in response to common but annoying questions, customizing them if necessary. You can build your own attorney-client version of Our Family Wizard.
Remind Former Clients That You Exist So That They Will Refer You to Other Clients
The clients who drove you crazy when they were on the warpath to get out of paying alimony or desperate to stop their children from forming a familial bond with their ex-spouse’s new partner start to seem more like esteemed colleagues once their divorce is final, and they have paid their legal fees. As you part ways outside the courtroom, you tell them to come back and visit, and you almost mean it.
You do not really want your clients to need your services again, but you do want them to recommend them to others. If it is tacky when Uber drivers ask you to give them a five-star rating, it is even tackier when lawyers do it. If you want your former clients to provide word-of-mouth advertising for you, the best thing you can do is send them subtle reminders that you exist. Posting content on your blog helps your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, making it easier for total strangers to find your website. You can get twice as much mileage out of the same content by also distributing it to your former clients as an email newsletter. Even if they only open a small percentage of the newsletter emails, seeing your law firm’s name in their inbox will be all it takes to get them to mention you when someone they know asks if your former client knows any family law attorneys.
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