I can’t count the number of times I’ve been the brunt of a client’s anger or irritation just to hear that same client interact completely respectfully towards the attorney just one minute later˳ We understand that you are likely going through one of the most stressful and traumatic periods of your life; however, it doesn’t give you license to treat us poorly during the process˳
When we are mistreated, we always inform our attorney about it˳ More often than not, the attorney will note the poor treatment and insist on solely interacting with you in the future˳ If you don’t think that’s a “punishment”, then I suggest you study the differences between your attorney’s hourly rate and their legal assistant’s hourly rate˳ I’ve also witnessed attorneys firing clients over an interaction that was deemed particularly heinous˳ Assumably, if you didn’t want the attorney to remain your attorney then you’d have fired him rather than the other way around˳
Legal assistants have long memories and more power to influence your case than you may give us credit for˳ A few of the tasks we routinely handle in a client’s case are:
- Keeping a case organized and moving along
- Providing the client with updates on their case
- Drafting many of the pleadings and related correspondence
- Filing documents with the court
- Disseminating information about the case to those who have a need to know
While the majority of legal assistants won’t allow a negative interaction with a client to seriously affect any future work on their case, it’s fairly common for us to put “difficult” clients’ matters at the bottom of our to-do lists˳
The Takeaway: Before you launch into an attack on your attorney’s legal assistant, you should first consider how important the above tasks are to you˳ Simply put: JUST BE NICE˳
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