Today I’m going to teach you one of the most important and un-taught skills of a lawyer who actually cares about their clients: the acknolwedgment email.
One of the biggest complaints clients have about their lawyers is a lack of good communication. If you think about it, this is fairly ironic given we consider ourselves to be the world’s greatest communicators.
But the complaint doesn’t rest upon unnecessary compound sentences. Nor does it find its genesis in our irrational use of the word “hereto”. Instead it comes from a far more basic place: just wanting to know what the heck is actually going on.
So as a firm, and as a lawyer, one of the greatest implements to use is the wonderful, but humble, acknolwedgment email.
Here’s how it goes: your client sends you some instructions. You send an acknolwedgment in reply.
See how easy that is?
So if it’s so easy, why do so few lawyers actually embrace the idea? After all, if you contact a service provider, wouldn’t you find it a far better service if you had a short response, confirming they had received your communication and letting you know when to expect something more? Wouldn’t that be great!
The acknowledgment doesn’t need to be complicated. It simply needs to say something like this:
Hi Jo, thanks for your email. We’ll take a look at this as soon as we can. At this stage we hope to get back to you by [date].
Now Jo knows you’ve received their communication, when they can expect a reply, and they’re not sitting around in limbo wondering what’s happening.
Simple. Easy. Good client service.
Bonus Points
If you’re a junior lawyer or a clerk in a law firm, then you’re not necessarily going to be the one sending emails like this out to clients.
But you know who you CAN send it to? People inside your firm who ask you to do something.
After all, those people are basically your clients – they ask you to do things, and you do them. They want to know what’s going on too, because they need to know what you’re up to to manage their own clients and workflow.
So if you get an email from a senior lawyer in your team asking for your help on something – send them an acknowledgment email! Running late, change to the plan, got delayed? Update them!
Happy Lawyering!