I've been in this business for a long time (I handled my first divorces and custody cases more than twenty years ago) and I never cease to be amazed at how poorly many of my clients manage their end of the attorney/client relationship. Now, I'm not really condemning them, because they are going through a really stressful period of their lives and many of them have no experience in working with an attorney, so I don't have any right or reason to expect much, but if they would do a few common-sense things, their lives would be a lot easier (not to mention MINE), AND their fees would be a lot lower.
So, if YOU have a family law case and have an attorney, or are planning to retain one, here are a few things you can do to make the relationship work well, and save you legal fees to boot.
1. Be organized, especially for your first consultation. If the case has already been filed, bring with you everything that has been filed, or that you have been served with in the case, preferably in order of the date filed, with the oldest on the bottom and the newest on top (this sounds odd, but we attorneys are used to documents being arranged in that order). This is especially important if the case has been going on for some time. If you don't have all the documents, save yourself a lot of money by going to the courthouse and ordering a complete set and presenting them to the attorney. If you retain the lawyer, he or she is going to have to get all those documents anyway, and you speed things up by giving the attorney the lot of them from the beginning.
2. Follow advice exactly. This is particularly important if there are protective orders or other specific rules you have to follow. Many of my clients have gotten in trouble when they sent one "innocent letter" to the opposing party, notwithstanding my advice that the existing protective orders prohibit ALL contact of whatever kind.
3. Provide ALL requested documents, exactly as requested. If the lawyer says he or she needs all your bank statements from six months before the date the divorce Petition was filed up to the current month, don't just provide the most recent six months from the date of the request and neglect to provide the records from the other months, while arguing to your attorney that you "don't see why she needs all those other records." You can bet that the attorney is requesting them because some rule requires that exactly those records be produced to the other side, no ifs ands or buts. Making the attorney request these documents from you repeatedly only costs you more money. The attorney isn't asking for the records because she has a record collecting fetish or just because she needs even more piles of paper filling her file cabinets and cluttering up her office. She needs the records, for those dates, in that form, or she would not ask for them.
4. Take notes. Bring a note pad to all meetings with the attorney and use a notepad when you call the office. My clients spend huge sums of their money asking me the same question three or four times. Better yet . . . .
5. Ask your questions by email. There is hardly an attorney on the planet any more who does not make liberal use of email. If you ask a question by email, you get a precise, well thought out answer (as opposed to the off the cuff answer you MAY get on the phone) that you have in writing to refer back to again and again, and to read over and over until you really understand it.
6. Show up for appointments on time. Your attorney has set time aside for you, and may have appointments after you that will be thrown off if you are late. Be punctual and, if you find yourself unavoidably late, call the office and tell them you are coming and, if you are going to be significantly late, consider offering to reschedule. Many attorneys have very busy schedules that have little leeway for the unpunctual.
7. DO NOT just drop by the attorney's office, except to drop off and pick up documents when you have been requested to do so. There are few things more disruptive, especially in a a small law office, then having one or more unexpected clients just show up (many times, more than one client will pick the same time to appear and demand attention from a small staff and/or the attorney who may have other things scheduled or have planned to use the time in question to attend to the mountain of work on the desk). An attorney is a busy professional, similar to a your family doctor. Call and let them know you are coming and, if possible, make an appointment for a particular time so that the attorney or the staff can give you the attention you deserve.
8. Have reasonable expectations regarding time. If you retain an attorney on Monday Afternoon, don't expect to have your complex Petition for Modification of Custody, Parenting Time, and Child Support done by Wednesday morning. A week to ten days is an entirely normal and reasonable time frame for a law office to generate even the most routine pleadings except in a dire emergency, given how tight most attorney's schedules are and the extent to which their attention is demanded by court appearances and "hard" deadlines.
9. Have reasonable expectations regarding return communications from the attorney. An attorney is not like an insurance clerk, working at a desk processing one file after another in the order received from eight to five every day. Rather, many attorneys, particularly those with trial-related practices, must spend much of their time out of the office attending hearings and conferences, meeting with opposing counsel, investigating cases, and engaged in other activities that keep them away from their desks, sometimes for days at a time. And, when an attorney who has been out of the office for a three day trial gets back in the office, there are often so many urgent phone messages and emails to return that it can take a day or two to get through them. I have explained this to client after client, yet I frequently will get a phone message from a client on Tuesday and, if the call is not returned by Wednesday morning (even though my staff has told the client that I am in a three day trial out of town), I get home to find three angry emails in my in box complaining about how I "never return phone calls." When the staff tells you that the attorney is "in conference" or "out of the office," more likely than not this is not a dodge but a true statement of what is going on. I practice in one of the geographically largest counties in the United States (Mohave County, Arizona). The Mohave County Superior Court holds trials and hearings in three cities, Kingman, Bullhead City, and Lake Havasu City, each of which is about an hour's drive away from the other, and there have been weeks in which I have had to appear personally in all three (indeed, there have been individual days in which I have had to be in two of the three). I often meet with opposing counsel in Bullhead and Kingman, which can keep me out of the office all day. Unless I am going to give up all of my evenings and weekends to returning phone calls (not a good idea when one is married has a 14 year old daughter), there are going to have to be times where it may take a several days for people to hear back from me.
10. Be specific when referring to documents. Every court document has a title--it usually appears a few inches down from the top of the page, opposite from the part of the case caption that gives the names of the parties, and often right below the case number. Every letter has a date. Often I spend the five minutes of a phone call with a client trying to ascertain what document they are talking about. The client says, "I am really upset about this letter I got from the court saying that I have to . . . ." when the client actually got no letter from the court and certainly nothing that says that they have to do what they think they have to do. On the other hand, if the client would tell me, "Hey, Paul, I have a question about the Order to Appear that I just got in the mail from your office," then I would be able to give useful help right away.
The attorney/client relationship is a two way street that requires hard work from both attorney and client. If you work with your attorney and bear in mind a few simple facts, you can make things move more smoothly and far less expensively.
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