I recall a particular client who may have been the worst about this. I pulled up to my office at 7:30 a.m. to start my work day and he was sitting outside in his car. He came inside with me and wanted to know if there had been any new developments in his case. I assured him that there had been nothing new to occur since the time I spoke to him at 4:30 pm the previous day. After telling me things again that we had already discussed, he left and I didn’t hear from him again until almost two hours later. He called while I was meeting with a client, and then called twice more while I was still meeting with that same client because I had not yet returned his call. I called him back, and he again had nothing new to discuss. Later that day he sent me an email checking on the status of the case, and then about a half hour later called the office because he had not yet gotten a reply to his email. Near the end of the day I sent him a reply to his email affirming that nothing new had happened in that time span (during this time we were waiting for the deputy to serve a lawsuit on a person he wanted to sue). The next morning I went straight to the courthouse for a hearing rather than go to the office, but I learned from my secretary that he was sitting outside the office when she arrived. After being huffy with her because I wasn’t there, he left only to call three more times that morning, leaving increasingly hostile messages with her and on my voicemail. The reason for his anger? That he hadn’t gotten a return phone call, even though I had emailed him at the end of the previous day that the defendant had not yet been served and even though he already knew I was in court conducting a hearing on someone else’s case.

The story of that guy goes on and on until I finally fired him and dropped his case because I was unwilling to put up with his behavior any longer. And this character was even paying by the hour, so he was getting charged for wasting my time and he still couldn’t stop doing it. The next lawyer he hired told me about the guy showing up at his house while he was still drinking his morning coffee at the kitchen table because he was not yet at his office.

Unless you have worked in a law office, you have no idea of the ridiculous behavior people exhibit. I often wonder whether these people would act this same way with their physician’s office. People don’t expect a surgeon to stop someone’s surgery to take a routine phone call from them, yet they expect lawyers to be able to chat on the phone while the lawyer is conducting a trial. If not being willing to put up with that kind of behavior off of a client makes me an ass, then so be it. I’m perfectly happy representing sensible people who don’t waste my time, and I am now much more cautious about who I will accept as a client than I was in the past so that I don’t have these problems arise any more.

Lawyers like any other professional or vendor are PAID fees for services rendered and if you can’t live up to that obligation, you should be holding your hand out for money.