Solo Contendere

By Michael Kemp

Few resources are more precious to small-firm practitioners than our time. Even when it is not billed hourly, there is only so much to go around. Just twenty-four hours is rationed to the average attorney each day. Inevitably, our days are disproportionately apportioned. Too little goes to the tasks we would rather be doing, because so much is taken up by things we would rather not: administrative duties, networking, and of course, that client.

We all know the one. Yes, there are as many types of bad clients as good ones . . . but then there is that client. The one who is never there to answer your questions but has a thousand of his own. The one who wants an hour’s worth of hand-holding every week even when his case has not changed. The one who clearly spends hours every day “researching” his issue and emailing you hundreds of irrelevant links or legal suggestions, but won’t gather up the simple files you have told him repeatedly you need, which are certainly gathering dust in his filing cabinet. Yeah, that client.

The problem is, of course, that it’s not always easy, especially when you are new in the practice, to see how you can spot those sorts of problems before you are already committed to his case. But if you haven’t seen it before, you will. In trying to describe that client to others thinking of starting their own practice, I was never able to come up with a good way to describe the way to spot one before he struck. But recently, completely out of the blue, it came to me in one word.

Righteous.

That client feels righteous about his case. Righteous is not the same as passionate – there’s nothing wrong with a client feeling passionately about his case. Often it helps. No, the righteous client is the one who feels that his cause is just and his intentions pure; that he has been wronged by the world (personified by the State or XYZ Corporation) but will triumph because good must always triumph over evil. For the elder generation of lawyers, think of the ending of almost every movie made before 1960, where the hero (with the help of a good-hearted but bumbling sidekick: you) fights off the forces of tyranny and then rides off into the sunset to the sounds of the loudly swelling music of John Phillip Sousa. For those lawyers slightly* younger than I am, think of the ending of Legally Blonde. That is how the righteous client sees himself.

The righteous client wants you half as the voice of his own legal strategy, and half as an audience to his persecution and eventual, inevitable redemption. He is sometimes hard to spot because he will readily agree to pay (with the understanding that because of what they took from him, it may not be much). More importantly, he is not a con man, lying to you about how great his case is. His errors are hard to spot precisely because he so firmly believes them. He will take your advice grudgingly. He is much happier sending things to you than receiving things from you. And in the end, he will probably take more of your time than he is worth.

To other small-firm practitioners out there: what sort of red flags do you look for when you interview clients? What sort of tests do you use to determine on whose case you will devote a portion of your twenty-four hours?