TO-WIT: MY BUDDY
The letter was neither short nor sweet. It’s essence, however, was readily distilled. “Please send my entire file to my new lawyer at the address listed below. You needn’t worry about your fee. I’ll make a payment every month until you’re paid in full.” And with it she had included a money order for $25.00.
Given the total amount of her bill and discounting it over the length of time she intended to pay it, I figured I had handled her unemployment compensation hearing for about seven dollars.
Now I have been a lawyer long enough to realize that from time to time everyone gets fired, theoretically even me. Hard to believe, yeah, I know, but let’s be honest about this. Clients are the sort of people who appear at their lawyer’s door expecting justice, and as far as I’m concerned, anyone who entertains such fanciful notions is capable of just about anything.
Most times the discharge is quite predictable. My experiences over the years have taught me that clients always give off certain subtle telltale signs that presage the event, and when it finally happens, I am usually prepared for it. Sometimes a client will stop returning phone calls. That’s a clue. Sometimes a client will assault you with a butcher knife. That’s a clue too. In this particular instance, the client tipped her hand when she asked to borrow my Martindale-Hubbell.
As a rule, it does not bother me to get canned. Usually it happens only when there has already occurred such a breakdown in the lawyer-client relationship that the final blow comes as a relief, and this case was no exception. My client had been difficult from the outset, but I had managed to keep her under control until the unemployment hearing when she became enraged at me for not trying to impeach her former employer when he testified as to his name.
The thing that makes this particular episode so significant is that I broke one of my most important rules when I first took the case. The client had been a good friend at the outset, a person with whom I had a long and satisfying friendship. I have long known that the boiling cauldron of litigation can disintegrate even the strongest bonds of friendship, and that’s why I generally don’t like to represent friends in adversarial matters. But when the new owner of the business fired her from the job she had held for many years, she was simply devastated, and I was the second person she called. It should have been another tip off of things to come that the first person she called was her psychiatrist.
Friendship aside, there were other reasons why I was initially reluctant to get involved. For one, she lived in a distant county and for another, I don’t do a lot of that kind of work. But she begged and pleaded for me to represent her, and despite my reservations, I finally, reluctantly, agreed to do so. After all, I figured, isn’t that what friends are for.
I asked her to write down a summary of all the events leading up to her discharge and fax it to me. “Not to worry,” she said, “I’ve been keeping notes.”
Right then and there I began to regret my decision. There are three things that I have learned to fear in this lifetime. The first is marriage, the second is the fantasy that I will be forced to parachute naked into a major metropolitan area during rush hour, and the third is a client who keeps notes.
I was not off the phone with the client thirty seconds before my fax machine began to whir to life in the copy room. Three hours later it quit, exhausted both of paper and spirit, having reproduced a chronicle that equaled War and Peace in length and exceeded it in bloodshed.
“Read this,” I told my associate, “and prepare a summary for me by Monday.”
“That was the summary,” she told me on Monday.
The issue at hand was simple enough. Was my client fired or did she quit? At the time of the hearing, the case went pretty much as expected, save for the moment when the hearing officer threw my client’s husband out of the room for shouting answers to his wife across the table. And I must confess I was also a bit surprised when under cross examination my client identified a document as her fifteen page letter of resignation.
I thought that my summation was nothing short of brilliant and had won the hearing officer entirely over to our side. Unfortunately whatever gains I had made with my closing were lost when my client got down on her knees at the end of the case and prayed aloud to the Lord to forgive all the employer’s witnesses for lying under oath.
“She’s just very religious,” I told the hearing officer, but I could tell he was not entirely persuaded.
After the hearing, my client called to tell me how wonderfully I had performed. After she got my bill, she called to tell me how fair and reasonable it was. And after she got the opinion from the hearing officer, she called to tell me how mistaken she had been in her earlier assessments.
“How could he question my credibility,” she said. “I didn’t lie anymore than the other side.” When the conversation ended, I suspected I hadn’t heard the last of her discontent.
And, as her recent epistle evidences, I was right. From its contents I deduce she has three major gripes – my performance, my fee and my lineage. I guess we’re not friends anymore.
So today I wrote her back, returning her money order, canceling her bill and wishing her the best of success with her new attorney. Under such circumstances as these, graciousness is the best response. It evidences professionalism and class, and it has been my experience that nothing infuriates an irate client more. And best of all, it only cost me seven bucks.
© 1995, S. Sponte, Esq.