Tag: client disputes

When the Check Goes *Boing* – Lawyers and Credit Cards

Hey hey, it’s Wednesday here on Lawyers and Liquor and that means…what exactly does that mean anymore? I don’t know guys, I’m ankle deep in a ton of litigation stuff right now, and as I swim through the sea of stupid that is email and text message review in discovery, I find myself drifting back to a happier time. A nicer time. A more genteel era. I am, of course, talking about the time when your clients paid their damn bills in full and on time.

Alright, so, a little background here. My office, when I came into it, did not accept payment in any manner except check or cash. Now, because I have a bad tendency of representing people, and because people aren’t exactly known for their tendency to carry around thousands of dollars in cash, this meant the majority of my clients paid with a check. I know, there’s a younger generation of people out there going “What is a check? I just figured out those squares with the faces of dead guys on them last year, now you’re telling me there’s some other way of old-timey paying for goods and services?” Here’s the explanation: A check is like a paper version of a debit card that takes three-five days to hit your bank account. Of course, you have to make sure all the details are filled out correctly, deal with the Publix check cashing fee, and even then, it may bounce…

You may be familiar with these if you’ve ever worked for someone that feels Direct Deposit is a tool of the devil or you have a grandmother that refuses to send cash through the postal service.

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Who Drives the Bus, Part 1: McCoy v. Louisiana

Let’s start with the commonly accepted preposition that our clients are, by and large, incapable of finding their backsides with both hands, a map, and a native guide. Whether the client be the sweet little old lady from down the street or the meth dealer who’s been the scourge of the Shady Acres Mobile Home Community for the last three weeks before he fell behind on his rent, clients are collectively idiots without a single clue as to what’s in their best interests. It isn’t even their fault, really. As a society they’re trained to second guess people by television shows that teach them nice, and ultimately meaningless, phrases like “post hoc ergo propter hoc” that they can parrot back at the nice man or woman in the suit in front of them and make demands.

We live, ladies and gentlemen, in the Golden Age of Dipshittery, where any asshole with access to Google and a cable subscription can fancy themselves a lawyer. All hail King Dipshit, as he wanders into the office and proceeds to immediately second-guess the attorney. And, of course, because we learn the law from folks whose names are preceded by words like “Professor,” we of course have the vitriolic reaction of any learned professional when T-Bone tells us he  totally thinks we should argue he was driving that ATV through the nunnery because aliens told him to: Sit down, shut up, I’m the goddamn lawyer.

And so, today and Wednesday, we’ll talk about the division of decision-making between an attorney and their client, i.e., who has control over what and when in an attorney-client relationship.

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Dracula: The Deadbeat Client

It’s Monday on Lawyers & Liquor, and the first order of business is “Where’s the second episode of the podcast, asshole?” Well, the answer boils down to “I’m a technological incompetent with little ability to do things without a person holding my hand.” The audio recording of my interview with this episode’s guest, Chad Murray from www.chadtalkslaw.com, came out fucking awful on my end and has forced me to amplify my entire half of it…and of course I didn’t record it as two separate tracks and shit, which would have made sense. So it’s been a painstaking process, but the next episode will be out this Wednesday, so that shit’s at least sorted out finally.

Next, tomorrow’s Halloween, and I fucking love Halloween. It’s the time of year where people get to dress up as terrifying monsters, which for me simply entails wearing my normal daily lawyer get-up, and go passively rob people of their candy through a series of vague threats. “Treat,” the little bastards cry, “or trick.” It warms my soul, what little bit of it remains, to see the next generation getting the hang of armed robbery so goddamn early.

But for lawyers, every day is fucking Halloween, isn’t it? I mean, we all deal with monsters in some capacity in our work, from murderers to child molestors, all the way down to the guy that’s simply not going to pay his bill and put some small company out of business because they’re a fuckin’ skell, right? Right, motherfuckers, right. And, in fiction as in reality, lawyers have represented some horrible fucking monsters, haven’t they?

Like Dracula.

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An Offer They Can’t Refuse: Getting Clients to Pay, Part 2

Alright, so Monday I talked about all the reasons I hate it when a client doesn’t pay their bill. The main reason, as you might have gleaned, is because I provide a service, like every attorney out there, which requires me to use my knowledge, time, resources, and professional expertise to help people that can barely count to 11 even if they take off their pants first. This is not an easy task and frequently leads me to question my life choices. I know there are some industry professionals who use Chaser, Credit Control Automation For Xero, Qbo And Sage to collect unpaid bills but there are also some other ways to collect owed money too.

Today we’re gonna forge forward by talking about the four options frequently focused on when a client refuses to pay, and since it’ll be a long one, let’s just go right into this shit.

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An Offer They Can’t Refuse: Getting Clients to Pay, Part 1

Let’s take a minute here and talk about the clients that stiff you on the bill. I’ve talked about this stuff tangentially in the past, but then it was always sort of in the vein of “how to avoid getting stiffed when picking your client.” Now? Now I want to talk about it in a little different of a light. I want to talk about what you do when a client is stiffing your ass on the invoices, and what options you may have.

First, though, let me say this post was supposed to go up last week. However, I used a hypothetical in the first version of all of this shit that greatly resembled a situation that arose when a client tried to fucking stiff me on my bill. So, discretion being the better part of valor, and realizing that people may take a hypothetical as being about them, I took that post out of the fucking rotation on the site. Better to keep my license and lose a post, you know?

That’s all resolved now, though, so I feel free to go on my mini-rampage about the assholes who come to you in tears begging you to help, and then afterwards decide that your effort was, for some fucking reason, sub-par and not deserving of compensation despite the fact you hit them a home run on a case that was based around shit like “My dog drank soapy water and shit out bubbles, therefore I am entitled to $1,000,000,000 and a new car.”

So, buckle the fuck in buddy, cause over the next two days we’re gonna go full bore on the bastards that think they can steal from me.  Today is part 1, which should help you shitty motherfuckers understand why a lawyer stiffed on their bill has a goddamn right to take it personally.

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