My Blackberry allows me to practice personal injury and medical malpractice law from anywhere in the world.
I can be sitting on the beach in Sanibel Island, Florida watching my wife pick shells and take calls from potential clients. I can be traveling through St. Maarten in the Dutch Netherlands Antilles and get a message about a new client that called who wants to talk to me.
My Blackberry allows me the freedom to live my life. It allows me the freedom to run my errands, pick up my kids from school and take them to activities, and to get on my bicycle and exercise during the day. My Blackberry allows me to communicate with my office and my clients no matter where I am or what time it is.
Traditionally, if you work in a law firm, you spent most of the day in your office working on cases. If you were going out for lunch or to a meeting you left word with your secretary where you would be. Before cell phones there was no way to contact you directly to get in touch with you.
Every lawyer now has a cell phone, and most have smart phones. Most attorneys are not taking advantage of how smart phones like a Blackberry or an iPhone lets you practice law outside of your office.
If done right, it will change the way you practice law.
As a solo practitioner, I am responsible for every single case in my office. I know everything that goes on in each one of my cases from start to finish. In order to keep a handle on client communications, I use my Blackberry as a tool to communicate instantly with my office and my clients. If I step out of the office and a potential new client calls my office, my custom and practice is to contact that individual immediately so they don’t have to wait or look for another attorney. How do I do that?
Simple.
My secretary sends me an instant message through our Blackberry instant message application, known as BBM. She types in that person’s phone number along with a brief message. Before I had a smart phone, I used to have to track down a pen and paper and would scramble to write down a new client’s phone number wherever I happened to be. With the use of our Blackberry messages I no longer need to find a pen to write anything. I can simply click on that phone number and it will connect me immediately. If my secretary is fast enough, I can get that message within a few seconds and make that call before the potential client has had a chance to walk out of the room they were just in. Their response is “Wow, that was fast! Thanks for calling me back right away.” That’s the impression you want to make.
Here’s a great tip that will help lawyers understand the benefit of becoming untethered.
Let’s say your normal business hours are from 9 AM to 5 PM each day. Once you leave your office, or your secretary leaves at 5 PM, all calls go into voicemail. From a new client’s perspective, voicemail is the kiss-of-death. You have to assume that somebody calling a lawyer’s office after 5 PM has a pressing legal matter that needs attention and needs an answer right away. If you allow those calls to go to voicemail, you run the risk that you will lose that potential client forever. The better practice is to have your calls forwarded to your smart phone so that you are instantly accessible for any new potential case.
For those lawyers who do not want to be available at all hours of the evening, I suggest you tell new clients what your office hours are, but if they have pressing legal questions that need immediate answers, you are available to them for an extra two or three hours after normal business hours. You can let them know that they can access you directly on your cell phone from the hours of 5 PM to 7 pm or 8 pm five days a week. This gives them the feeling that you are doing something special for them, and is an added value to your legal services.
Becoming untethered from your office phone is extremely liberating. Colleagues and clients don’t really care where you are in your travels each day as long as you can provide them with a few moments of your time to give them your expert legal advice. Being connected is the key to keeping your clients happy. Having a Blackberry has done that for me and more.
Gerry a is a solo practitioner handling medical malpractice and personal injury cases here in the state of New York. In addition to his website, Gerry has an active video blog where he explains how medical malpractice lawsuits work in New York. He is the author of the popular book Doctors Gone Wild and runs The Lawyers Video Studio, which helps lawyers create video to market their legal services.
