Video Transcript:

Petrillo: Why isn’t my attorney returning my call?

Goldberg: Well, I think that depends on which attorneys you’re talking about. I can tell you that many of the cases that we take over from other attorneys that are not referred to us, that’s probably the biggest complaint that we get, is that they’re not so sure what their attorney’s doing on their case, but they are sure that their attorney’s not returning their phone calls. If I have a friend or an acquaintance that stops returning my phone calls, I stop being their friend and acquaintance. And I don’t know why any lawyer would expect differently of their clients.

Petrillo: And I wanted to respond to that as well. One of the things that I try to do is manage phone calls. Because a lot of times people don’t realize when they call, they think we have an instant recollection of the file. And so I found over the decades that I’ve been doing this kind of work that it’s best if we set aside a time so I can review the file and apprise myself of what’s going on and then make recommendations in addition to answering questions. And so a lot of times what I’ll do is sometimes there’ll be questions that I’ll ask my staff to deal with. So, I always encourage people when they call to let us know what the question is because this is all we do is personal injury work, many times we’ve gotten that question 10 times that day and many times the staff can handle it.

And there’s other times where there are things that are going on in the file that are just more complex than a simple question. But I found that many times that call, that question is a trigger to it’s time to get the file out to review it. And so, in my younger days I would have people come in. Today people tend to be a lot more busy and so what I’ll try to do is I’ll try to set up a telephone appointment for people to come in or so we can at least have a scheduled time where I allot that to a particular person. Because sometimes it’s just very difficult to make good or give good advice. The advice that you give is only as good as the facts that support it.