by Lee Rosen on July 2, 2009
She called. She left a voicemail. She NEEDS to talk to you.
When are you going to call back? When I talk to lawyers I get the sense that they’re planning to call back within a day or two. It might be today, it might be tomorrow.
She’s sitting at home waiting for the return call. She may even call your office to let someone know that she’s running out to pick the kids up at school and can now be reached on the cell phone. She really expects a call – soon. She’s certain she’s as important to you as you are to her. She’s sure she made the right decision in hiring you and knows you’re someone she can trust.
She believes you’ll call her back within a few minutes, maybe a few hours. She gets calls back quickly from her friends, her pediatrician’s office, even the cable company. She can’t fathom that it could take you days to return her call.
Call her back. If you can’t call her then have someone else call her. We do more damage to the image of lawyers by our failure to promptly return calls than by anything else we do. Bar association image programs do nothing to help our image with someone that was in a crisis and couldn’t get her attorney on the phone. Call her back.
You can improve the situation – but you can’t entirely manage it – by better setting expectations. Explain your plan for returning calls at the initial consultation, explain it in your client handbook and have your voicemail system or receptionist explain it again. If your plan is to call back in two days then just say it. “We call back in two days. Take it or leave it. If you have an emergency or a crisis – it’s still two days.” By setting expectations in advance you head off some, not all, of the client upsets. You may also, if you tell people your policy, reduce your caseload so you can call back faster.
by Lee Rosen on July 1, 2009
Client meltdowns are miserable. It’s painful to deal with the upset and get a client back on track. Trust is damaged and it’s hard to restore. Meltdowns stink.
Once it’s over and the relationship is patched up it’s worth taking a few minutes to reflect on the situation. Sometimes, not always, we can learn from the meltdown and take action to prevent future problems.
The difficulty I sometimes run into with after-action analysis is a tendency to believe that the problem discussed during the meltdown was really the problem. For instance, we recently misaddressed a letter and accidentally sent it the spouse’s address rather than to our client. The spouse informed our client and explained that her “lawyers were idiots.” This didn’t help our relationship with the client and the meltdown ensued.
The attorney managing the case was upset with the administrative assistant that had labeled the envelope. Blame was assigned. The attorney, exhausted by the upsetting client encounter, lashed out at the admin. The admin’s supervisor got involved. The attorney’s supervisor got involved. It started off ugly and ended uglier.
It’s unfortunate that the envelope was sent to the wrong address. But the problem likely started long before we mailed the envelope.
When a client melts down, when they reach the point of no return, it’s not usually, exclusively, about the thing that put them over the edge. The problem began much earlier when the temperature started to rise, long before it reached the boiling point. It’s likely that other mistakes were made – maybe a delay in returning a call – or a misspelling in a document – or an off-color joke – and those mistakes raised the temperature in the first place. The final straw – the misaddressed envelope – can’t really be blamed for the entire problem. And that administrative assitant can’t be assigned full responsiblity for the problem.
by Lee Rosen on June 30, 2009
This is going to blow your mind (at least it blew my mind). We need a new employee in our Charlotte office. We ran an ad last week on careerbuilder. I’ve provided the full text of the ad below. We had 476 applicants within five days and more are coming in every hour.
Here’s the ad (I’ve highlighted the important part in red):
Full Time Administrative Assistant/Paralegal
Rosen Law Firm seeks Full Time Administrative Assistant in our Charlotte, North Carolina office.
Our firm strives to employ professional, ambitious people with high energy who embrace new challenges. This job demands the ability to handle responsibility with little supervision. This position will be filled quickly. We are ready to bring the right candidate on board immediately!
Responsibilities:
* Answers phones, greets & seats clients
* Scan documents and handle document management within client database
* Manage office supplies
* Make courthouse runs
* Draft court documents
* Taking payments and bank deposits
* Serve as back up point of contact for potential client calls and other administrative duties as assigned.
Requirements
* Bachelor’s degree
* Excellent communication, organizational and interpersonal skills
* Detail oriented with strong phone presence
* Proficient in Microsoft Office applications, basic understanding of Office Operations
* Experience with QuickBooks
* Must have a willingness to interact with our clients on a daily basis
* 80% of this job will be Administrative work and 20% will be legal assistant related duties
* Desire to innovate and an enthusiasm for change
* Ability to build strong and sustainable relationships and an aptitude for dealing with people at all levels of the organization
* A strong history of personal and professional growth
* A positive, big-picture, long-term perspective
* A history of exercising initiative and taking responsibility
* Work schedule expectations: 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, Monday through Friday and additional, hours as needed. At least one Tuesday night per month, you would be required to stay late.
Benefits:
* Competitive salary
* Company paid health, life, dental and vision, insurance
* 401(k) match
* Three weeks paid leave with additional time each year
* Annual salary review and evaluation.
To apply: PLEASE FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS:
Please email your (1) resume, (2) cover letter and (3) salary requirements to the address listed, in this posting. Please attach a (4) link to a video posted on YouTube.com (or any other video hosting site) in which you answer the question — “Why would you be good at this job?” Please provide an (5) email address and (6) your availability during the next two weeks for an interview. Any application submitted without these six elements will not be considered. ABSOLUTELY NO PHONE CALLS.
Of the 476 applicants we had 7 that fulfilled all 6 of the requirements. One of the 7 didn’t have a Bachelor’s degree. She was eliminated (probably a mistake we ought to fix). Less than 1.5% of the applicants followed the instructions. How is that possible?
Maybe some potential applicants are bothered by the video requirement. We can assume those people didn’t apply. I am aware of the exposure we create by requiring a video, but we decided it was worth the risk.
I can only assume that the vast majority of the applicants failed to read the entire ad or that they are incapable of following the instructions.
I’m tempted to go back through the resumes and find some other candidates that look good on paper. There are plenty of them. But I now know that they don’t follow instructions well. Following instructions is an important part of the job we seek to fill. Wouldn’t it be insane for me to consider the other 400+ people after they failed to comply with our request?
This experience is really depressing. I just can’t believe it.
I’ll be interviewing most of the people that followed the instructions later today. I hope to find an excellent candidate. I’ll let you know.
by Lee Rosen on June 29, 2009
More and more attorneys are opening new practices. It’s tough to deal with financing a new firm and it requires careful thought regarding personal and business finances. How much money do you need to open a new practice? Where will you get the money? How long will it take for the money to start to flow?
Erik Mazzone and I provide the answers in this podcast.
I worked in a firm for three years before opening my own practice in 1990. It’s been awhile since I did it and some things have changed. But, lots of things remain the same. Erik advises new practices on a daily basis and is living on the frontline with many of these practices by providing advice as they go along.
We provide some specific action steps that are essential to the success of a new practice.
During the show we make reference to a couple of sites. The links to these sites are provided below -
QuickBooks Online
Google Voice
Standard Podcast [28:02m]:
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by Lee Rosen on June 28, 2009
