Although a good lawyer must have a high standard of legal technical ability it is equally important they are customer care savvy. Depending on the type of legal advice or assistance that you require, you would expect your lawyer to be well informed as to the state of affairs surrounding your case. For example you would expect a business lawyer to have a strong commercial awareness and a property lawyer to have an understanding of mortgage lender requirements. Legal advice does not exist in a vacuum and it is because of this that good lawyers are identifiable by their customer care skills.
Key Skills
A good lawyer should exercise the following key customer care skills when taking on a case:
- Listening and understanding.
As basic as this sounds, lawyers must listen to their client and acknowledge all the particulars of the case before trying to distinguish the important facts. The client should feel that they have been able to give their opinion on the matter, and discuss what they would like to achieve. The lawyer should then repeat the facts of the case back to the client so make sure that they have a complete understanding of their aims, this should be done before offering any advice.
- Plain English
Any advice provided should be explained to the client in plain English without the use of complex terminology. A good lawyer should be articulate in a manner, which allows him/her to explain complex legal issues in layman terms.
- Communication and reporting
Decent lawyers should ask their clients what their preferred method of general and emergency correspondence is; i.e. how are they most accessible - email, phone etc? Once this has been agreed, the lawyer should make sure that they keep the client up-to-date on any developments, letting them know what is going on and taking any new instructions. If you feel like you do not have a grasp of what is happening in your own case, then this is a sign of bad client care.
- Non-legal advice
It is not always the case that a lawyer should provide legal recourse to a problem. A practiced lawyer will tend to be able to offer common sense advice alongside the legal advice he/she is giving, even if this means that the client does not need further legal services.
- Assignment
If a lawyer's technical expertise does not cover an area of your case, they are under a responsibility to ensure that the matter is transferred across to another team or individual more knowledgeable on the matter. If the case does get passed to another lawyer, the original lawyer should also inform him/her of all of the facts of the case (which incidentally should be documented in the file), this should prevent the client from having to recite their whole case again.
- Billing
It is common occurrence that a fixed fee is given for a legal service yet unforeseen costs arise causing the final bill to be larger than what was agreed. This means that a good lawyer should talk to their client prior to proceeding with these extra charges, and get their consent to carry on. Another method is where the lawyer agrees an overflow budget with the client, which then is put aside for costs such as these.