Quality of Care and the Law

There are Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and websites where people can vent about their bad experiences with attorneys. The website BarComplaint.com provides a database of attorneys with less that great reviews. They call it the “Attorney Misfit Database.” Anyone can visit the site, read reviews, and rely on that information when choosing which attorney to engage. But is that fair?

The reality is that most attorneys are extremely competent legal practitioners (How else did they pass the bar and persuade you to hire their practice?), but not all of them are great all the time, at everything. Some may feel challenged relating with clients, reading their clients’ emotions and providing support which many clients need when facing a legal issue. A recent report states that attorneys are particularly poor at correctly intuiting their clients’ feelings of urgency, confusion, frustration, and relief--and the last two most of all.

But shouldn’t they be?

At SimpleLaw, we’re in the business of creating the conditions for an ideal attorney-client relationship; we’re interested in reducing clients’ anxieties, streamlining attorneys’ work, and improving communication between both parties.

So we have a thought or two to share on what you can do to make your clients’ experience in the legal process better.

Clients’ Time is More Than Billable

Most of the time attorneys spend with clients is considered billable hours. So, the attorney is making money during almost every interaction with clients.

While this transactional relationship is necessary and just, it has the potential to vacuum a lot of charism out of the relationship.

In our experience, the best attorneys--the ones that bolster their clients--are the ones that overwhelmingly overcome that transactional perspective.

These attorneys are mission-driven ones. They are inspired to do their work because they aspire to truly support the person and their legal need. They exude the intuition that being an attorney is not just a career, but a vocation for the service of others.

How is Your Practice’s Quality of Care?

If you want to be a more mission-driven attorney, this is the sort of question you want to be asking yourself.

In the healthcare field, the concept “quality of care” helps to evaluate how a person is treated while ill or injured, and how well they recover from that illness or injury. The World Health Organization defines quality of care as the degree to which patients receive health care that is “safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and people-centered.”

Even though this concept has an undeniable medical focus (think the Hippocratic Oath), we suggest it can help you reflect on your attorney-client relationships. It can help you assess how you relate to your clients and understand what they are experiencing.

Safe and Equitable

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Nobody hires an attorney at a high point in their lives. Your potential clients are walking into your office, or reaching out to you through legal technology, with a great deal of trepidation and an awareness of the financial cost that comes with hiring an attorney, not to mention a pressing legal matter.

While there is only so much you can do on the money side, you have the means to relieve their anxieties. Consciously creating a secure environment where two people are on an equal playing field, discussing an important personal matter and taking the shrewdest steps to rectifying it.

Timely, Effective, and Efficient

These three adjectives all have to do with the quality of your work, and the quality of your work has a large influence on the quality of your care.

We strongly suspect that a substantial amount of the frustration and confusion that clients feel is due to control. Clients realize they have no control of their legal case, that they lack the requisite legal knowledge and, obviously, a law degree.

Again, there’s no disputing the surety that the super-majority of bar-certified attorneys in the United States are proficient attorneys. But timeliness, effectiveness, and efficiency in the attorneys' eyes and in the eyes of your peers and staff is potentially different from what it is in the eyes of your clients.

This is why transparent communication and regular updates are so important to the attorney-client relationship. It reassures clients that you are on their side, fighting their fight with the privileged training you have.

People-Centered

This component of quality of care is really an overarching one; if you are creating an attorney-client relationship that is safe and equitable, rooted in transparent communication, and is timely, thorough, and competent in the work produced and shared with your client, then your practice is people-centered.

How Do You Know If Your Quality of Care is Lacking …

There are some easy ways to find out, including offering clients a way to anonymously provide feedback to you. It can be through an online survey, written, or if you have the option, a page on your website where comments can be left. Or, if the attorney and client are comfortable, it's a great conversation. This check-in can be done periodically throughout the matter, too.

You may be tempted to see if an attorney profile is on the Bar Complaint website. If you do choose to go there, or Yelp or anywhere else, remember that a legal matter can be highly emotionally charged for clients. And, as a result, so can the reaction and vocabulary. Whether client or attorney, remember, people generally post reviews when they are unhappy. The greater majority of people don't post reviews if they are happy. So focus on the issue for learning, not to automatically exclude an attorney.