Mark Bennett, the Texas Tornado, posts (on his newly reformatted blawg) about a difficult time with an otherwise good client.

After waiting 40 minutes for him to turn up and then trying to get him to come to the point for half an hour and then finding half an hour later that the first point wasn’t really the point and then finding out another half hour later that the second point wasn’t really the point either, all the while trying to get a straight answer from him, I stood up, unceremoniously announcing that our meeting was over.

Packed into these few words are some important lessons for newer criminal defense lawyers.  More than important, they are critical.

When someone comes to you, it’s not because you’re good-looking, dance well or know a lot of funny jokes.  It is because they need a lawyer, a professional who is capable of helping them with their case.  They want you to serve them as a professional, though they often have great difficulty in expressing this desire.  It is up to the lawyer to guide them and control them so that they get to the place where you can be the lawyer.

Initially, when the client shows up 40 minutes late for an appointment, you already have a problem.  It demonstrates a lack of respect for your time, and therefore for you.  This needs to be addressed immediately.  Your time is critical to your success as a lawyer.  You can spend it working on your clients’ cases, or you can sit around waiting for people to show up whenever they please.  But the time lost can never be recaptured, and one client suffers while another wastes your time.  It’s unacceptable, and clients need to know that.

Then there’s the story.  There’s a reason why they come to you, even if they are embarrassed at first to tell you.  Even if clients are inclined to tell you the real reason up front, they will preface and spin it in such a way as to guarantee that you here the story their way, meaning with every excuse and argument in their favor they can muster. 

This story is useless to you as the lawyer, but given enough free rein they will take all day convincing you what a great guy they are and how innocent they are.  At the end of the story, you are incapable of rendering useful advice because you still know nothing about the problem, only the excuses for the problem.

Clients often need some catharsis, and I generally give them a few minutes to vent.  Then my efforts are spent focusing them in on the important elements of the problem: “What do the cops say you did?”  Not why you want to explain to me that you didn’t do anything and they can’t prove it anyway.

Many lawyers avoid taking a client to task for wasting time with nonsense as a matter of marketing and public relations.  This is understandable; They pay the fees and it’s generally not in a lawyer’s self-interest to be intolerant of the person paying them.  But they pay legal fees to receive professional services, not a baby-sitter, hand-holder or therapist.  Sure, there’s components of each of these in our work, but we must maintain professional detachment if we are to serve our clients.  The client cannot be left to dictate the means by which we perform our job.  We are the lawyers.  That’s why they come to us.

When we try to appease the client by allowing them to go on ad naseum, we do them a disservice.  We also do ourselves a disservice.  An hour of Mark’s life was wasted for nothing, and he ultimately blew his stack.  No one benefited from this experience.  Mark, being a nice guy, felt badly for losing his cool, but this happens.  What went very wrong was the loss of control of the meeting.  Mark is a very tolerant guy, which no doubt makes him very likable to clients.  To some extent, this is a wonderful attribute.  But only to some extent. 

What cannot be forgotten is that a person came to a lawyer for help, and left without it.  A lawyer gave his time to a person to help, and provided none.  At the end, there were two unhappy people and nothing was accomplished.

Mark is a highly experienced lawyer, and no doubt smelled that the story was wrong after 5 minutes.  He tolerated the client’s talking at length in the hope that at any moment, he would finally get to the point and Mark could provide the help and counsel for which the client came.  It’s always a tough call as to when to shut down a client, seize control of the conversation and direct it toward a more useful subject.  But that’s what the job of being a lawyer demands.  Sometimes it requires us to stop being the nice guy and start being the professional.

Don’t be afraid to be a lawyer.  It’s why clients come to us in the first place.