TO-WIT:
You’d think after thirty five years of this business, I would know better, wouldn’t you? Yeah, well, apparently I didn’t, and instead I made the biggest mistake a lawyer can make, short of missing a statute of limitations or advising a doctor on business. So now here I sit, a tad weary for wondering how’s come I didn’t know better.
Like most kinds of client matters, this one started with a simple phone call. “Can you please help me,” a young female voice said, “they’re going to take my car away.”
Now if there is any sentence in the English language that strikes more terror into the hearts of clients than “they’re going to take my car away,” I have yet to hear it. “You’re under arrest” may come close, followed perhaps by the far more common “Have you been fooling around with my wife.” But when push comes to shove, there remains nothing quite so terrifying to the average citizen than a confrontation with those dirty bastard “theys” who are going to take the car.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said, as if I hadn’t heard this story a gazillion times before, and so she did. But contrary to my expectations, this client was ready, willing and able to make the payments she had agreed to make when she purchased the car. When she had left the dealership with the car, she thought her financing had been arranged, but that was her own fault, really. She had no business drawing such a conclusion from the fact that the salesman said her credit had been approved, and she certainly should have been wary when she received her new title to the vehicle some weeks later from the state.
Yet despite such obvious red flags, she didn’t have a clue there was a problem until the dealership called her two months later and demanded she return the car. It was only then she learned her credit application had not even been processed until a month later, by which time she had had to quit her job to attend to her mother who had just become critically ill. Of course without employment she had been declined credit and now the dealership wanted the car back.
I scheduled an appointment for her some four or five days hence, and thought nothing more about it until she called me the next day to tell me the dealership had called again, threatening immediate repossession. I promised I would call the dealership to see what I could do.
It wasn’t hard. I know something of the car business and after a few heated exchanges with an obviously chagrined sales manager, I had the problem fixed. The dealership had agreed to be responsible to a lender if she defaulted, a lender had readily agreed to that, and the problem was solved.
Well, her problem was solved. Mine, however, was just beginning. “What do you mean ‘I owe you money,’” she complained over the phone when she got my bill. “I never really hired you. Besides, you only made a phone call or two.”
And that’s when I realized that I had done a really really really stupid thing. In my haste to relieve this client of her quiet desperation, I had done the work before working out our financial arrangement, before meeting her, before I could charm her with my wit, charm and dulcet tones. Oh sure, I had resolved her problem, and, oh sure, it was a great and relatively inexpensive result, but I erroneously thought that would have been enough for her to be grateful. Silly me, huh? Who knew she would revert to typical clienthood so soon?
I just made it look too easy. No client will be happy with a bill if he or she knows it only took one phone call. No, no, a client must believe the lawyer sweated bullets, researched long into the night, lost sleep, worried, worked hard. Having to face the cost of a success too easily attained only serves to irritate a client who, under the best of circumstances, thinks justice ought to fall freely from the sky like manna. And to then first ask a client for payment after the necessity for engaging counsel has already passed is bound to be problematic. It is to avoid similar problems that ladies of the evening insist on payment in advance, so I’m told.
Ah, but unlike missing a statute, this story has a sweet ending. A few days later I got a call from a colleague and friend who advised he had been consulted by my client about my bill. He knew the whole story, he had received a two hundred dollar advance retainer, smart man, and he offered to split it with me if that would solve the problem.
It did. I got paid, he got paid, and the client only had to spend twice the price to do it. There’s a kind of bittersweetness here, there really is, and a lesson to boot. Most importantly though there’s a check here as well, and frequently that’s the sweetest justice of all.
© 2005, S. Sponte, Esq.