On today’s Inside Look by Brooks, Steve talks about the best method of communication with your case manager and attorney at Brooks Law Group.
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Welcome
I have some laryngitis today. I just returned from a trip to Washington D.C., I had a good trip, but it’s good to be back in the office – back to the old routine. But I’m not going to talk long today because of my voice, but I wanted to talk about something that we coach our new clients on: the best way to communicate with us.
Communication
Old School – you hire a lawyer and a week or two weeks later you have questions that pop up that you forgot to talk about, so you pick up the phone and you call your lawyer, but he’s in court with a three day trial, and he doesn’t call you back until the next week and you get frustrated because it takes him a week to call you back. We try to coach clients that, really, the best way to communicate is by email or text and there’s a lot of advantages to that.
The first one being, if you send an email or text, you get an opportunity to reread what you’ve sent. So, you may, after you read what you wrote, you may think “I didn’t ask that very well. I left something out.” It gives you a chance to amend what you wrote, to make sure you’re distilling the question down to the information you want to ask. In terms of the recipient (the attorney or paralegal) that receives the email, they have it to look at if they get distracted or are working on something else, so that they can reread it and that their response is exactly on point. It gives the recipient a better chance of responding more succinctly.
The other thing is, a lawyers we work in teams, and so if you ask a question – if you send an email to me and let’s say I’m your attorney and am at a deposition in Georgia, if you had called me, I may not be back in the office for a week so your frustration builds, but if you email me, I can look at my phone and if I can’t answer the email, I can send it to my paralegal and ask her to respond to email, or I can route it to an attorney who’s working on the part of the case you have a question on. It allows me to collaborate with my team members to get you the best answer possible.
Another thing that email or text allows, since we have a very sophisticated case management system where we store all of our digital communication with our client and attorneys on the case. So, it gives us a chance to go back and revisit prior conversations and store those and have them readily available, so if someone is involved in the file later on, they can go back and have a good history of the file and have a history of all the nuance questions that may have been answer
Conclusion
There are a lot of reasons to do it, but the best answer is it keeps the frustration down and gets better answers fast and collaboratively. That’s why we recommend emails and texts. I apologize again for my voice, really struggling today. I hope everyone have a wonderful weekend. I look forward to seeing you again next weekend. Thank you and thanks for joining me!
