Communications Policy

Ask people what they dislike about working with lawyers and the answer is rarely about the law. It is about not hearing back. Of everything in this library, this is the procedure most likely to change how a firm is perceived.

Section one

Silence and thinking look identical from outside

A client whose file is progressing well and a client whose file has been forgotten receive exactly the same thing from most firms: nothing. From the outside, careful work and neglect are indistinguishable, so the client assumes the worse of the two. This is the central fact of legal client service and almost every complaint traces back to it.

The professional reputation problem follows from it. People do not conclude that lawyers are bad at law; most have no way to judge that. They conclude that lawyers do not call back, do not explain, and do not seem to care, because that is the part of the service they can actually observe.

It is also an ethical matter, not only a service one. Most jurisdictions impose an affirmative duty to keep clients reasonably informed and to respond to reasonable requests for information. A firm without a written communication standard is meeting a mandatory obligation by memory, on its busiest days, which is exactly when memory fails.

The remedy is a stated response standard, an assignment of who says what, and a proactive update that goes out whether or not there is news. The third of those is the one almost nobody does, and it is the one that changes everything.

Section two

Purpose and scope

Section three

The response standard

Two numbers, written down, measured monthly. Pick what you can meet in a bad week, not a good one.

Set a maximum time to acknowledge client contact and a maximum time to substantive response. A common and achievable pair for a small firm is acknowledgment within one business day and a substantive answer within three, with anything urgent handled the same day.

The acknowledgment is the important half and the half firms omit. It is legitimate — often necessary — for a substantive answer to take days. It is never necessary for the client to wonder whether their message arrived. A one-line reply that says "I have your message, I am in trial until Thursday, I will call you Friday morning" costs fifteen seconds and eliminates the anxiety entirely.

Define urgent explicitly so staff are not guessing: a court date or deadline inside a stated window, a served document, an arrest, an emergency affecting the client's safety or the matter's viability. Everything else follows the ordinary standard.

Then measure it. Once a month, sample ten client messages and check how long acknowledgment actually took. A standard nobody measures decays within a quarter.

Section five

Channel rules

Decide which medium each kind of communication belongs in, so the record exists where it needs to and the client is not chasing information across four apps.

Staff may discuss status

Where the matter stands, what has been filed or received, what is scheduled, what documents are needed, and logistics. This is most client contact and staff should handle it confidently.

Attorneys discuss strategy and consequences

What a development means, what the options are, what the firm recommends, likely outcomes, and anything the client will make a decision on. Staff route these rather than answering them.

Nobody guesses

"I don't want to give you a wrong answer, let me check with the attorney and come back to you today" is always the correct response, and is never held against anyone who uses it.

Every matter has a named contact

The client knows one person's name and how to reach them. Firms where the client does not know who to call generate the most inbound frustration.

Section seven

Difficult conversations

Delay makes every one of these worse. Four principles cover most of them.

Deliver bad news early and by voice. A lost motion, an unfavourable ruling, a development that changes the value of the matter, or a mistake the firm made — the client hears it from the firm, promptly, from a person, before they learn it elsewhere. Nothing damages trust faster than a client discovering something the firm already knew.

Say what it means and what happens now. Bad news without context leaves the client to imagine the worst. State the development, its practical effect, the options that remain, the firm's recommendation, and the next step with a date.

When the firm has erred, say so plainly. Explain what happened, what the firm is doing about it, and what it means for the client. Where the error may have affected their interests, tell them they are entitled to seek their own advice about it. This is uncomfortable and it is also the professional obligation.

With an angry client, listen before explaining. Most anger in legal matters is accumulated uncertainty rather than a specific grievance, and it dissipates when someone finally takes it seriously. Acknowledge the frustration, establish what specifically went wrong, say what will change, and follow up in writing.

Updates only when there is news

Which means long silences during exactly the periods when clients are most anxious — waiting on a ruling, waiting on discovery, waiting on the other side.

No acknowledgment while thinking

The attorney is genuinely working on the answer, and the client, hearing nothing, concludes the file is dormant.

Everything routes to the attorney

Status questions pile up behind the one person with the least time, and clients wait days for answers a paralegal could have given in a minute.

Interval set nowhere

Updates depend on someone remembering. On a busy month nobody remembers, and the quietest files are the ones that go longest without contact.

Bad news delivered by email

Or delayed until it can be paired with something positive. Both read as evasion, and both are worse than the news itself.

Standard exists but is never measured

Written into a manual, quoted at induction, and unmeasured for two years. Sample ten messages a month or assume the standard is not being met.

Section nine

Adapting it to your firm

Six decisions before this becomes your own procedure.

Set your two response numbers. Acknowledgment and substantive response, plus a written definition of urgent that staff can apply without asking.

Set intervals by matter type. Litigation in discovery, a transactional matter, and a matter awaiting a ruling all move at different speeds and deserve different intervals.

Write your four-part template. Draft it once, with an example filled in for your practice area, so nobody composes an update from scratch.

Draw the staff/attorney line explicitly. List the questions staff answer and the questions they route. Ambiguity here produces either wrong answers or unnecessary escalation.

Decide the text message rule. Whether texting is permitted, and if so how the substance is captured into the file. Do not leave this unaddressed; it is happening either way.

Set the after-hours expectation. What the voicemail greeting says, when the queue is cleared, and what a client should expect on a weekend. Stated clearly, modest coverage is entirely acceptable.

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