Words of Well-Being: Accessibility

It is axiomatic that—in modern parlance—“lawyers who represent themselves have a fool for a client.” This saying is ascribed to Abraham Lincoln. Of course, what saying isn’t? Honest Abe got around, but in order to have spent the night everywhere he is alleged to have slept and to have unleashed every barb he is alleged to uttered, he would have had to fake his own demise at Ford’s Theater, Jim Morrison style, and continue his tour of future bed-and-breakfast establishments for another 75 years, churning out a few pithy one-liners at every stop.

All of this by way of highlighting the notion that there is a fate worse than having a fool for a client. One could, after all, have no clients at all. It is important to have a literally winning way with juries, to dress for success, and to claim with a straight face a career replete with far more successes than failures, but without sufficient foot traffic the most gifted of advocates will soon be looking for another line of work.

There are more ways to reach out than ever before, and an ever-expanding host of would-be facilitators competing to assist us in extending our reach. Those of us with websites are incessantly exposed to exhortations to improve them. To glance at such invitations with even idle curiosity is often to be amazed by their garbled content. This isn’t necessarily because the authors can’t spell, type, or see their screens clearly; rather, this may represent a fairly effective method of dodging spam filters that zero in on phrases like “develop business,” “increase contacts,” and “get customers.”

Once we find that we have enough suitably flush clients to make a decent go of it—a state of grace often defined by criminal practitioners as “not having to take family law cases anymore”—then another concern rears its head: how to transition from establishing visibility to managing accessibility. It turns out that “there are only 24 hours in a day” is more than just a cliché, that entities designed to regulate our practices quickly become testy when we bill more than 24 hours a day, and that the ability we developed to forego sleep for seemingly days at a time is the stuff of increasingly distant memory.

Ironically, existing clients may infer avoidance when what counsel is really attempting to do is to be as accessible as possible. One fraught situation, in this age of multiple devices, can occur when we attempt to reserve a single telephone number in order to be reached virtually around the clock. Clients who return calls automatically to numbers from which they have been called in the past, and who are then advised to call “the” number that guarantees the quickest accessibility, sometimes suspect that what counsel is really attempting to do is to hide a number in order to gain a respite from client contact. Some may believe that a “home” number is being shielded. Others, almost quaintly, suspect that counsel is guarding a “cell phone” number, many years after the distinction between mobile devices and “land lines” has essentially evaporated.

This having been noted, an obsessive drive to be “all contact, all the time” and cast aside any limitations on accessibility may actually reflect an erroneous sense that clients will be too sensitive to these issues, particularly when being reachable results in an invitation to further, more time-consuming contact. In their article “Saying No: The Negative Ramifications From Invitation Declines Are Less Severe Than We Think,” marketing and management experts Julian Givi and Colleen P. Kirk speak to some of our most deeply rooted professional concerns when they observe that:

Sometimes we accept these invitations, whereas other times, we decline. But saying no can be hard. We worry about the negative ramifications that might arise. Will the person who offered the invitation be angry? Will they think I do not care about them?

These experts explain, however, that “invitees—those who are invited by someone to do something—overestimate how negatively inviters—those who extend the invitation—react to invitation declines,” and that “this misprediction is driven, in part, by invitees overestimating the degree to which inviters focus on the act of the invitee declining the invitation as opposed to the deliberations that went through the invitee’s head prior to declining.”

Rather than creating a rift in the attorney-client relationship, this situation presents counsel with a perfect opportunity to take that relationship to the next level, as we share with clients our own attempts to maximize responsible accessibility while remaining alert, focused, well-rested, and mindful of their literal investment in the most efficient use of the time for which they are being billed on an hourly basis.

Researchers affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, concur that such openness “is also related to mental flexibility, which refers to the ability to adapt one’s thinking and behavior to better fit with changing situations and contexts” such as those afforded by the ever-shifting obligations of legal representation.

Accessibility is a concept that handily reflects the guidance proffered by the “National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being” (the “Task Force”), an entity “conceptualized and initiated by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs (CoLAP), the National Organization of Bar Counsel (NOBC), and the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL)” and made up of several other “participating entities” from within and without the American Bar Association.

The Task Force has identified six pillars or “dimensions” that combine to “make up full well-being for lawyers,” one of which is the “Social” dimension, expressed in part by “developing a sense of connection” and “belonging”, that reaps dividends within the attorney-client relationship as well as the interactions that surround it. Although we may joke from time to time about clients “driving us crazy,” the opposite is often true, as there is much in the development and maintenance of a mutually supportive team that contributes to the well-being of all involved.