I love that after almost 30 years of being an attorney, I can still be shocked by stories of people that contact me. Here is one I was told recently by a woman injured on the job in Chicago, shared with her permission.
I hired an attorney almost a year ago after tearing my rotator cuff on the job. I got assigned to an attorney who has over ten years of experience so I thought I was given a good lawyer. My benefits got cut off after an IME over four months ago and I’ve been calling every week to see what is going on. The only number I had was the direct line for my lawyer and I kept leaving him messages with no response. I read your post where you recommended that if your lawyer is not calling back to call the main number so I did that. I learned that my attorney quit over three months ago and my case has not been re-assigned yet. What should I do?
Oh man, that is awful. Really nice woman with a big injury and her benefits appear to be wrongly denied. As far as what she should do, of course she should switch lawyers.
The bigger story is how could this happen?
The answer is that she hired a firm that has a lot of turnover among their lawyers and staff. They advertise a lot and take on thousands of cases. Many of the attorneys are either poorly trained or overwhelmed with cases. It is the type of firm where many of the clients are unhappy because they do not always do the work to service them when things go wrong.
In this case, they lost a lawyer who had a couple hundred cases assigned to him most likely. Each and every one of those cases needs to be reviewed and re-assigned to another lawyer. They already are not doing the best job on contested cases. So for the woman who reached out to me, she needed a new lawyer who would be willing to investigate her case but also deal with the hundreds of cases they are already handling on their own.
Alternatively, the firm could hire a new lawyer to take over the case, but they also would be taking over 300 or so other cases. You can’t just get up to speed on all of those cases that quickly, especially if the old attorney did not do a good job of documenting the file.
When files are not properly documented
The biggest issue here is that the file is not likely documented properly. When that happens, a new attorney will not know about:
- Your initial interview with the lawyer.
- Things you shared via email.
- Things discussed on phone calls and texts.
Some of these things can be re-created, but it takes a person who cares about their clients to do so and spend the time to really know the case. A good attorney can be more than up to speed within a few days, but you actually have to be willing to put the work in.
This firm is a huge red flag. They can get good results for their clients and surely do on many cases. But it’s also the type of firm where I and other lawyers are constantly getting calls from their unhappy clients. Most stories are not this extreme, but have to do with bad customer service or attorneys who do not seem to care. So while they can get a good result for you, they also are more likely than most to cause problems with your case that should not happen.
This is one reason why the attorneys in our state wide network are selective about the cases they take on and do not overwhelm themselves or anyone in their firm with too many cases. They also do a great job of creating a paper trail so anyone can look at the file and know what is happening with the case.
A firm having a great documentation system is really important. It is not only relevant in case a lawyer leaves the firm, but important many other times. This includes when your lawyer is on vacation, when your lawyer needs someone to cover for them in court or when you call the firm and your lawyer is not there but you have questions that need to be answered ASAP.
This all reminds me of when I was a young lawyer back in the late 1990’s. I was in the courtroom of an Arbitrator waiting for my case to be called and was watching two attorneys discuss a case. The lawyer for the injured worker was covering for an attorney in their firm. Back then almost everything was done on paper. So this attorney, who was woefully unprepared, was shuffling through papers to try to learn basic case facts. It was pathetic.
Now every firm I know of uses an electronic documenting system, but that still requires a lawyer or staff member to actually enter in what happens on a phone call, interview, etc. Sadly these firms that overwhelm their workers with cases are not always on top of this. They might even have a firm policy about how things should be done, but it still requires someone to actually do it.
These are things you could not possibly know as a client when you hire them. That said, it is why when you start to notice bad customer service, you do not let it drag on. The only mistake this injured worker made was waiting more than three months to search further as to why her attorney was not getting back to her. Unfortunately her health and her work comp claim suffered in the meantime.
