Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Red Flags and Redlines: Why Some Clients Need to Go
Ever had that client who makes your stomach knot every time their name appears in your inbox? The one whose case you've kept far longer than you should have? You're not alone.
Today I'm tackling my number one client tip for attorneys, and it's not what most expect. Forget marketing strategies or case valuation techniques – the most crucial skill is learning to "rip the bandaid" by terminating problematic client relationships promptly and professionally. This seemingly simple action can save you years of frustration, wasted energy, and needless stress.
Through personal experience (including some painful lessons), I share the three critical red flags that signal potential client issues: inconsistencies between client reports and medical records, the client who complains about everyone they encounter, and the excessive editor who doesn't trust your professional judgment. These early warning signs almost always intensify rather than improve with time.
The decision to terminate a client relationship is never easy. We fear the phone won't ring again, or we've already invested too much time, or perhaps worst of all – the client is genuinely nice. But maintaining these relationships past their natural conclusion inevitably leads to regret. As one colleague bluntly asked after I finally terminated a particularly difficult client: "What took you so long?"
Whether you're a seasoned attorney or just starting your practice, mastering when to say goodbye to clients who aren't the right fit is essential for your professional longevity and personal wellbeing. Remember, there are plenty of clients who will value your expertise and guidance – and plenty of other attorneys who might better serve those you let go.
Have you faced this challenge in your practice? Share your experience, subscribe to the podcast, and pass this episode along to a newer attorney who hasn't yet learned this crucial lesson. Your future self will thank you.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello, welcome back to the show. Today I have another Friday solo episode for you. Today I'm going to be sharing my number one client tip. More important, I think, than marketing, more important than making decisions about how you're going to manage a case, more important than making decisions about how you're going to maximize the value of the case. This is client tip numero uno.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get to that, I want to say a big thank you to all of you out there for listening to the show, sharing the show with your friends, and for leaving me a rating and review. We're on the verge here of our highest download month ever, and it's only looking up from here. I also want to say a quick shout out to the couple of guys who have messaged me on LinkedIn. It's really cool that there are lawyers out there who I don't know and have never met inside Virginia, outside of Virginia, who are listening to the show and giving positive feedback. My question to everybody who's reached out to me has been what kind of stuff do you want to hear more of? And so please reach out. I'd be happy to try to find a guest or hit a topic that fits your needs. Okay, hey, one last little intro note. You're going to hear something in today's show that resonates for you. If you've been practicing a while, you probably this is not the first time you've ever heard it. If you haven't been practicing for a long time, maybe it is the first time you've heard it. But my ask of you is that you share this episode with somebody who's younger than you in the practice, because I think it'll really help them out. Anyway, tip number one client. Tip number one is rip the bandaid. Rip the bandaid, and what I mean by that is not only delivering bad news quickly, and my firm belief is that bad news needs to be delivered quickly, needs to be delivered by the attorney, not the paralegal. Needs to be delivered with a message that here's how we're going to fix this. But I'm really not talking about delivery of bad news here. I'm talking about termination of client relationships, and the reason that I'm thinking about this today is because it's going on in my own practice.
Speaker 1:I was having a conversation today with my law partner about a case where liability is tough. It's the kind of case where we could probably get some money for this guy, but we also might not, and so what she said to me today was liability has been denied. I think I can get some money out of the adjuster, but the client's really a nice guy and I said stop right there, because every time that I've extended a client relationship past its time because of something outside of the merits of the case, I've regretted it. And so my advice to her was we can't be hanging onto a case and delaying the inevitable and it probably is inevitable in this case just because the client's a nice guy. This doesn't get any better with time, and I know this because I've been dealing with it for the last year in two of my cases and I didn't take my advice early enough on. I have a case now that's dragged on, for God, almost six or seven years because I have a client who, every time I've given advice to, she's done the exact opposite. And I've maintained the relationship and I'm angry about it and I vent to my staff, but I haven't terminated the relationship. And what happens when you don't terminate the relationship maybe not on the first time, but if you don't terminate it on the second or the third time, that a client doesn't listen to you and goes against your advice, then you wind up where I am, where it's 10, 11, 12 times down the road and you're like why am I even in this case? So let me tell you how I think about this.
Speaker 1:In the framework that I use when I think about ripping off the mandate is I like to look out for these early indications that a client is that I'm going to have difficulty with some client control or that a client isn't going to listen to me. Things like if a client tells you something different than what's in the medical records. So client comes in and says doctor said I need surgery. And you get the record and the doctor says needs physical therapy and injections and surgery may be somewhere way down the line. So I get the clients often hear the worst case scenario.
Speaker 1:But if the client is consistently telling you things that are not in their medical record, then that's a red flag, at least for me, and it's somewhere where I want to, early on, actually show the client the medical record and say here's what Dr Smith said. What do you think about this? Sometimes the clients go. I got to go back and talk to him and I got to clear it up. Or sometimes they say he's wrong and he input that wrong. Does that happen sometimes? Yes, does it happen as often as clients think it does?
Speaker 1:No, red flag number two for me, and along those same lines, is the client that complains about everybody, and this client, thank God, self-identifies very early on in the process, typically during the intake. This is the client who complains about the police officer that came to the scene, complains about the EMTs, complains about their treatment at the hospital, complains about what the primary care doctor said, complains about the receptionist at the physical therapy place. You are going to be the next person that they complain about and the only way to prevent that from happening is to terminate the relationship or don't accept the relationship to begin with. And red flag for me number three is a red flag that doesn't show up, unfortunately, until pretty late in the relationship, which is the client that edits unnecessarily and edits incessantly. So client who? You send them a draft of the demand package, you send a draft of the discovery and you get back all of these red line edits, and they're not substantive edits, because that's one thing.
Speaker 1:There are always things that clients know about their case that we don't know about the case, and that's perfectly fine. It's the phrase changes that get me and it's the reason that I usually won't represent other lawyers, because lawyers are awful about this. We think that we are genius wordsmithers and we think that our turn of phrase in the middle of a discovery packet is what's going to win the case or lose the case. And clients who, especially like the client who's the lawyer, who never actually practiced law these guys are the worst at that because they don't actually know how these cases proceed and so they will redline everything.
Speaker 1:I had a client one time I think he was a former litigator, he was former big law and we were on a phone call one time for 75 minutes going through line by line edits about commas and periods and this is early in my career. And I didn't push back and say, dude, I know what I'm doing, please just leave this alone. And I didn't push back and say, dude, I know what I'm doing, please just leave this alone. And I didn't push back and say, dude, I know that you know how to use red line, I know that you know how to use track changes, make the edits and track changes and send it back to me. This does not require a 75 minute phone call. So those, for me, are three indications of clients. Don't value your opinion, don't value your time and aren't going to listen to you towards the end of the case and when you do rip the bandage like it doesn't always go well.
Speaker 1:Just know that I had a client in the last year who sent me this list of complaints about the way that we were handling his case because he thought that we were doing a poor job managing his case and he was upset with the speed at which it was progressing. And I reminded him over and over again I can't make any effort to try to settle your case until you're out of medical care, because what happens if you need a surgery later? We can't get you compensated for that. And he was early in the care and we just weren't communicating on the same page. And so finally, like one Thursday night, he sent me these three complaints about the way that we were handling the case. And the last line of his email was I'm going to rest up and think about it and I'll send you a longer list tomorrow. And this is six or seven o'clock on a Thursday night that I opened this email and I responded to him don't worry about tomorrow, you're terminated. We'll send you a copy of the file.
Speaker 1:Was it the most professional email I've ever sent. No, was it the right decision? A hundred percent, because what happened next is that I got 20 emails from him over the course of the next five hours, continuing to rip into us about the way that we'd handle his case, and I could not, as we sit here today, be happier that we terminated that relationship. In fact, when I went in and told my staff, they were like how come it took so long for you to do that? And so does that suck in the moment when you get those emails on a five-hour period telling you how bad you are at your job. Yes, but really it's an indication that you made 100% the right decision, that your life is going to be better from tomorrow forward, having made that decision. So my number one advice to new lawyers is rip the mandate no-transcript.
Speaker 1:There are plenty of other clients in the sea that you can work on their cases and often we end up with these cases. Or we end up keeping these cases for one of two reasons One, the phone hasn't rang in a while and we feel like we need to work on this case, or the phone will never ring again. Or two, we've let this behavior slip three or four or five times, and now it's hard to terminate the relationship the sixth, seventh, eighth time that it happens. So catch them early, cut them loose. There are other lawyers who can handle those cases. It doesn't have to be you. Hopefully, some of this resonated with you. If it does, do me a favor, share it with somebody. There's somebody out there that has not had this experience yet who will thank you later when they do.
