We all know by going to movies or renown restaurants and the like that your treatment or experience of the theater, the restaurant or whatever is just as important as the content of the food itself. Politics is much the same way. Policy is important, but meeting expectations is critical to success. The stock market, more than fundamentals, relies more often than not on public traded companies meeting the expectations of Wall Street.
In this way, I have found that technology is creating an expectation of sorts that most lawyers ignore. It is called textpectation - the anticipation one feels when waiting for a response to a text message. After all, texting has created a since of immediacy.
Over the years we have weened our clients and potential clients from believing that they can reach us immediately by telephone. They have come to learn that because of other commitments that we would not be at their beck and call (literally). We have demonstrated that we would not be waiting by the phone for them anytime they had a concern or a question. So we have automated PBXs, and we have voicemail, and we have message trees, and we have extensions, and we have failed to give the client our direct phone lines for fear that we would be at the beck and call of their fluctuating affections (or lack thereof).
But, what we have also done is to have learned them in the art of modern communications, namely email and text messages and IMing, that typically bypass the palace guards and lands on our notebook computers and our PDAs. Our clients comply with our wishes for simpler and mobile text communications that we can deal with in almost any environment, such as emailing or texting while in court, a deposition, traveling in a car, sitting on the john, or (if you are Rick Georges and Grant Griffiths) during the homily in church or mass.
With this, however, comes textpectation on the part of the client. They email or text you and they are waiting almost immediately for a response. (God help family lawyers). When they do not get this response, at least during normal business hours, they feel cheated, bamboozled, disgruntled, dissatisfied, thwarted, disheartened and, maybe the worse of all, overcharged by their lawyer.
The bottom line, as a provider of services, the lawyer can easily lose the expectation game -- or in this case the textpectation game.
And, whose fault is this anyway?
Part of it is undoubtedly societies as a whole. Technology eliminated the palace guards that use to guard us from direct messages. That is probably good. But, by putting us in direct contact with the client we do not have the visible excuses that the wired world provided us. My children have grown up with the expectation that for the cost of a cell phone and broadband that they should be reasonably able to reach anybody, save maybe the President, with a few moves of the thumbs.
Today, our clients can follow us on our blogs, on Twitter, on MySpace, and any number of IM locations or social networking sites. Not long ago I had an attorney get a little miffed because while I was ignoring his phone calls that day, I managed to post to a listserv he was following. Of course, I was drafting a brief that day and did not want to lose a half hour on the phone talking and then making notes, but for a little relief from the pain of it all it did not take much effort to post a small comment to a bankruptcy listserv and move on. That did not matter to him, and it probably should not.
The point is that we have created textpectations with all of those around us, and especially our clients. When we do not live up to those textpectations we lose out as assuredly as when not living up to any set of expectation of us.
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