I’m a legal assistant for the public defenders. One of the attorneys I assist is horrible at client communication. He never ever takes his damn client calls even though he’s in office. It’s not like the guy is in trial or doing motions because I would know. I deal with all his client calls. 98% of them are people complaining that he doesn’t get back to them or they haven’t heard from him over a month. All I do is take a message and pass it along. I can’t even schedule appointments because the attorney does it himself. I continue taking the message.
I told my supervisor that this is a big hurdle I’m experiencing because I’ve run out of excuses to say for why the attorney hasn’t reached out. Most often these people have tons of questions about their case. I can only do so much. My supervisor just excused him and said
“He’s good at returning calls. Take a message.” Clearly I’ve been doing that and it hasn’t been working. But fine I’m only going to do my job responsibilities; take a message and pass it along. It’s my not my job to hunt down the attorney to get back to his clients. It’s not my fault if he sucks. And I won’t be responsible for him getting bar complaints. I always note the message in the file.
I’m done giving a crap about this. When clients call mostly upset because the attorney hasn’t contacted me.
My go to responses of lowkey IDGAF:
”I’ll let your attorney know your concerns and pass along this message.”
“I understand your concerns but unfortunately that’s a legal question about your case that I can’t answer because I’m just an assistant. All I can do is pass along your message.”
“That’s out of my scope. I can only take messages and pass it along to the attorney.”
If someone is completely irate:”I understand your concerns. I’ll pass the message and that’s all I can do.” I immediately hang up or send them to the attorneys voicemail.
At this point it’s just sad because the clients talk to me more than their actual attorney. Yeah this job sucks but I need it more to pay bills. I just adopted this mentality of idagf anymore.