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Client Management in The Wake of COVID-19

They may not understand. The legal process is confusing during normal times. It can be even more confusing now.

Expect clients to be confused by the interruptions created by COVID-19. Federal courts have stopped. Case settings are meaningless. And in some cases, discovery needs to restart.

We spoke to Texas attorney, Roger Borgelt, to understand this better. Roger has pending cases in both federal court and state court.

Following are some of the topics we discussed with Roger. You can jump to his answers by clicking on the links below.

• How have you been communicating case delays to clients?
• How do you manage safety concerns with COVID-19?
• How do you respond when a client becomes non-responsive out of fear relating to COVID-19?

How have you been communicating case delays to clients?

I’ve got some language that we used in an agreement where we basically ditched our entire procedural schedule in a San Antonio federal court case, memorializing our agreement and why we were making the agreement, what the rationale for it was, and how we would proceed once we had a status conference.

We then agreed from that point forward that we would talk periodically as things opened to figure out what the new deadlines would be, and we laid out all of the rationales for why we were doing this – lack of access to offices, lack of access to information, all of these kinds of things. And so, I have borrowed from that language to explain to clients why things are just not happening in their case right now, and most have been very understanding.

The hardest ones are the ones where we were smack in the middle of discovery and we had just sent out a bunch of discovery requests, right before COVID hit – or at least the response date was during the time after COVID hit. We've just had to sit because there's not a lot you can do in these cases if you don't have your discovery done.

If you can't get to the information to do it, then everything just sits for two and a half, three months, and nobody likes that. Including the attorneys. Nobody likes it.

How do you manage safety concerns with COVID-19?

For the most part we're doing everything remotely, so there are not a lot of exposure issues going on in the law practice right now. I am meeting with my clients remotely, with very, very few exceptions.

The courts have been, for the most part, either closed or meeting by video only. And they're limiting the kinds of hearings that they do, the ones that are open. Now, all of these emergency orders are hitting the period where they are starting to expire. And I'm not seeing them extended as I was back in April and May. So, it may be that we're going to get to a point where we don't have any of these orders in effect, and everybody goes back to normal. But it's still going to take a while for the courts to catch up on their dockets, and many are still not holding in person hearings or conducting trials.

How do you respond when a client becomes non-responsive out of fear relating to COVID-19?

People have all kinds of different reactions to this thing – how they're responding to it and how they're dealing with it.

In some ways it's a lot like financial risk, people's tolerance for financial risk varies. Some people say “oh, so what”, I’m going to try to carry on as normal as possible. And other people haven't set foot out of their house since the 15th of March. So, it's risk tolerance and people are all over the board psychologically with that. They're going to be the same way with COVID as they are with their financial investments. You could probably use the same risk tolerance tests that stockbrokers give to figure out how people are going to respond to COVID.

They're just reacting to the way they feel. There's a rational component to it, but a lot of it is driven by your sense of risk and fear. And if you're in fear mode, then you're going to freeze up and not do anything.

Thankfully, I haven't had to deal with anybody that has been that far on that end of the scale. But certainly, I will say people are moving more slowly and cautiously in general. But that doesn't mean they're not moving at all. And people have a funny way – if their lawyer calls them or emails them and asks for something, they tend to think that they need to do it even if they don't really feel like doing it. So that helps.

Summary

Keep your clients in the loop as COVID-19 impacts their cases. Develop a template so you don’t need to recraft similar messages again and again. Don’t be surprised if you see clients become unresponsive. Risk and fear can be paralyzing. But look for productive ways to move them forward.

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