Table Of Contents
Legal cases are stressful. Most clients only have one legal case in their entire lives. They don’t know what everything means, how it should go, or what to expect.
Silence makes all of this worse. Silence actively causes stress.
When clients don’t hear from their lawyer, they start to tell a story in their own heads. Most assume something is wrong. They worry their case is being ignored. They replay worst-case scenarios in their head. They Google or ask AI, and usually don’t feel better afterwards. (Ever self-diagnosed something medical online? Google tells you everything might be cancer. Googling legal issues isn’t normally better.) When a lawyer stays silent long enough, clients often believe that their case is over or lost, and lose hope of ever recovering.
Not hearing from your lawyer is like waiting for medical test results and never getting the call. Even if everything turns out fine, the silence itself creates anxiety. Clients fill in the unknown with something that’s usually much scarier than reality.
We believe that kind of stress is unnecessary and completely avoidable.
Cases don’t get better during silence. But they absolutely can get worse. Waiting without communication isn’t a neutral activity. Evidence goes stale. Witnesses forget critical details, move away, or disappear. Clients’ lives change in ways that directly impact their cases for good or for bad. Clients don’t usually know about the potential impact on their cases unless their lawyers tell them. And law firms don’t know about clients’ lives unless they talk with the clients.
Clients are often made to feel like they are being unreasonable or taking up the lawyer’s time for wanting updates. The truth is, failure to communicate is one of the most common reasons lawyers are disciplined.
In just the first two months of 2026, multiple Florida lawyers were reprimanded or suspended for failing “to act with diligence or maintain consistent communication,” failing “to communicate with the client,” “lack of communication and lack of progress in cases.” (Those and other lawyer horror stories can be found here and here)
We believe clients should never have to wonder:
The reality of our legal system is that lawsuits take time, and a lot of that time is spent waiting for deadlines to arrive or for courts to make rulings. But even in a waiting zone, when there’s no major development, silence should not be the default. Thoughtful, honest updates matter. We think they matter especially during the quieter stretches of a case. A client should never feel like they need to chase their own lawyer for basic information.
We created a clear, measurable standard for communication at our firm based on that belief.
Lawyers are trained to work cases with the goal of winning the case or obtaining a settlement. Clients experience cases personally, including all of the steps that happen before a settlement or a trial. It’s easy for lawyers to do excellent legal work while failing to show that work to the client who is living with the case every day. When that happens, the lawyer probably feels like they are doing a great job, and the client feels abandoned. Good representation has to focus on both the ultimate goal, and the client’s personal experience all along the way to that goal. That must involve regularly telling the client what is going on and listening to what is going on in the client’s own life.
Every client of our firm will hear from their legal team at least once every 30 days. Every case. Every client.
Communication from us is going to include things like:
Sometimes there is major movement. Sometimes there isn’t. Either way, clients should not be left guessing.
This is not a vague goal or a “when there’s news” policy. It’s a defined expectation for every legal team at our firm. The standard is literal. We count out 30 days from the last communication. The only time it should go past 30 is if 30 days fall on a weekend, and then there should be a communication to the client on the very next business day.
We don’t make this promise just because it sounds good. We can only make this promise as a firm because we enforce it with a system.
Communication is tracked firm-wide and reviewed every single week. Each legal team (the attorney and paralegal assigned to the case) is responsible for meeting the standard on every single case.
Once a week, in a firm-wide meeting run by a firm owner, we review which teams have communicated with 100% of their clients in the last 30 days. Teams that meet the standard are publicly recognized in that meeting. If even one file is outside the standard, even by a single day, that team is not on the list that week. That’s uncomfortable by design.
If a file slips:
Perfection is the expectation. “Most of the time” and “pretty good” just don’t cut it. Misses are rare, and when they happen, we treat them seriously because they matter.
Communication failures rarely come from bad intentions. They come from bad systems.
Our communication system exists for one reason: clients deserve consistency, not good intentions.
Communication standards don’t just help clients know what’s going on. They force accountability both with clients and internally at the firm. No lawyer wants to tell a client that something is going to happen and then 30 days later tell the client, “It didn’t actually happen.” Regular communication forces cases to move forward. And, if communication is avoided, the firm can catch it early and fix it.
Without a system, cases get the most attention if something big or bad is happening, or if the client is a squeaky wheel. Being a squeaky wheel is a good strategy for dealing with your insurance company. Clients shouldn’t have to become squeaky wheels to get attention from their own lawyer. With a communication system in place, every case gets attention without the client doing the work to prompt the communication, and without the need for something big or bad to have happened.
Many firms say they provide “great communication.” Few define what that means. Fewer still measure it. We used to be one of those firms. We thought we were doing good work at communicating, but looking back now, we don’t think it was as good as it needed to be.
(We’ve seen how clients have reacted to our communication in Google reviews alone. We had an occasional review before. Now we regularly get reviews that talk about communication.)
We believe clients should be educated about what good communication actually looks like in the legal world, and, sadly, how rare it still is in the legal profession. An informed client is better equipped to choose their law firm and hold their lawyer accountable.
We also believe the profession can do better. Clear communication shouldn’t be exceptional. It should be expected.
Legal cases are stressful enough. Wondering whether your lawyer is paying attention shouldn’t be part of the experience.
Our 30-Day Communication Promise is one of the ways we take care of our clients. We think it takes consistency, transparency, and intentional work from the beginning of a case to the end.
