Yesterday my post was on Legal Access Plans, a legal insurance provider that gets paid by employers to provide legal insurance to the company's employees.  I marveled at the business model, which takes the employers money but doesn't have an attorney lined up to provide the services until an employee calls in.  Then the benefits provider has to scramble to find an attorney willing to work for far less than the market rate. 

Today, I'm thinking about the difficulty of working with clients who don't pay for my services.  When I first opened my practice, I was all gung ho about pro bono.  Working pro bono means working for free to provide legal assistance to someone who can't otherwise afford it.   In my time, I've worked with the local courts and bar associations on Pro Se Divorce Clinics (wayyyy back when I did divorce work), Probate Advice Days, and Metro Volunteer Lawyers, a service that links those who need pro bono services with attorneys willing to help them.  I eventually had to quit Metro Volunteer Lawyers because I found that too many of the clients that came from there didn't value my time.  After all, they weren't paying for my services, so some of them thought nothing of calling me daily or more often.  Others went the other direction, in that they didn't respond to my requests for information or return documents in a timely fashion.  Those were time sucks, too, because my office had to spend a lot of time chasing those clients down to get what we needed to represent them effectively.  With paying clients, they are more judicious about using my time because they are paying for it, either through my hourly fees or my fixed rates.  Also, if it comes to firing a client it's much easier for me to tell a paying client that we have to part ways than to back out of my commitment to Metro Volunteer Lawyers. 

Of course, not all pro bono clients from Metro Volunteer Lawyers were like this, but too many of them were.  More than once I was reminded of a comment made by my professor/mentor at my law school's Free Legal Clinic.  He once remarked that for him the frustrating part of pro bono work was that too many of his clients didn't learn from their mistakes.  He would help them get out of a jam, only see them repeat the same behavior that got them into legal trouble.

What does this have to do with Legal Access Plans and similar legal insurance programs?  My experience over the past several months has been that a sizable number of the clients and prospects these programs directed to our office also didn't value our services.  One of them called and insisted that she could only work with us over the phone as it was just too much trouble for her to drive from Boulder to our offices.  We declined that representation.  Another met with me and hired me to do estate planning for her (paid for by the legal insurance) but then never showed up for her delivery meeting to sign and receive the documents.  In that case, I had done almost all of the work but so far remain unpaid for my services. 

When I work with clients who aren't pro bono or covered by insurance, I usually collect 1/3 to 1/2 of the expected fee when I am hired.  This has worked for me because it keeps both sides motivated to keep moving towards completion.  The client has now made an investment of money and time.  As a result, doing his "homework" and attending our meetings becomes a priority in order to get the final result he paid for.  I haven't collected the entire fee, so I am motivated to complete my end of the transaction so I can get paid and keep the office lights on.

I like to treat my clients as equal members of the team.  In order to avoid getting ulcers worrying about clients who don't sign their papers or get me the information I need, I remind myself and my team that "We can't care more than the client does."  But some clients who don't have to pay for my services don't seem to value my contribution to the team.