The Boundary Line
When you are an involved practitioner, there is a constant struggle to establish and maintain firm boundary lines. What do I mean? I mean a strict practice of maintaining a separation of action and thought between our legal work and our personal and private lives. I call it a practice because much like our legal work encompasses a “practice”, the ways in which we have to segment our work away from our personal lives takes consistent practice. This is because a lot of us are consumed with doing a good job for our clients and for our businesses. So, when you are very preoccupied with wanting to do a good job all the time, you can become distracted from understanding that there needs to be limits with your work. I am sure our ultra-competitive sisters and brothers are scoffing at this notion. How can we, these amazing supah-dupah-troopah lawyers, accept and practice that we must have limits to our work? Well, if you do not want to die at your desk, I suggest you consider this.
Maintaining proper boundaries, in my opinion, is essential to healthy longevity in this practice. I think there are two main boundary lines that I find I need to work to maintain in order to keep enjoying what I do. The first boundary line has to do with my relationship with my clients. The second boundary line has to do with my relationship with the act of running a small business.
Relationship with Clients:
We love our clients. We want to help our clients. However, I believe that in order to best help our clients we have to maintain a strong and consistent boundary with them. This practice inevitably ends up benefitting us, and that is why I think this is an important part of practicing.
Establishing boundary lines, in my practice, means being very clear with clients about when it is appropriate and necessary to reach me, under what circumstances, and how they are to utilize me when they do. Most people that come to a lawyer for help are usually in some type of crisis or what I call, in a pickle. So, when a client is in a pickle, sometimes, everything and every step in order to work their way out of the pickle feels crucial and emergent. Some client matters are emergent. But I have found that most of the time, if a client is anxious and wanting to get a hold of you twenty-four hours a day, that anxiety is misplaced and the client really needs help with learning how to discern what is an emergency and needs to be attended to immediately and, what is not an emergency and can wait. For me as a practitioner, I consistently am working to establish what these boundary lines are so that I maintain them with every client. This is important for me because it helps me better focus on what I need to do for this particular client and, most importantly, it enables me to enjoy and feel fulfilled in the representation. Also, establishing this boundary line enables us to not take on our client’s anxiety and sense of imbalance. If we do that, it is not only not good for us mentally, it distracts us from performing to our highest potential for our clients in aiding them with their legal problem. So, what are my boundary lines regarding my relationship with clients? Take a look:
- Clients may only contact me during my firm’s established business hours.
- Unless I am in the final stage of trial preparation, under a filing deadline, explicitly let the client know I will be contacting them for a certain reason, or I need to relay time sensitive information, I do not contact nor have my client’s contact me outside of business hours.
- Clients may not have my personal cellular phone number.
- When I first started in private practice, a very great and wise friend who was an attorney told me never to give my personal phone number out to any clients. I am eternally grateful for her for that bit of advice. Bottom line, my personal number is that, personal. If I choose to use my cellular phone to call a client, it’s patched through to the office line so the office number shows up on their caller id.
- I do not discuss specifics of my personal or private life with clients.
- I know this one seems disingenuous considering you are reading my blog about practicing, but I take great pains to relate to my clients without revealing all aspects of my private life. I also don’t usually volunteer information either. If a client asks me about aspects of my private life, I answer in a way that is responsive but not completely revelatory.
- My vacation away message is not just a suggestion.
- I am allowed time away from my practice and my business. I have worked hard and earned this opportunity. This is my time to spend with family, friends, or just to decompress. When I tell my clients I am on vacation, I am on vacation and they can reach me when I return to the office, period.
- Referrals, referrals, referrals.
- The stress of their legal predicament leaves a lot of our clients in search of not only legal counsel, but also a friendly ear to listen to their feelings about it. One of the parts I thoroughly enjoy about my practice is the freedom to take the time to listen and counsel (legally) clients through this rough time. However, I am not a psychologist or mental health professional, and some client’s woes surpass just counsel regarding their legal position. So, in order to best maintain my role as their legal counsel and not their therapist, I suggest (and sometimes strongly suggest) some clients seek and get mental health treatment to help them through the emotional aspects of the process while I work with them.
- Fee Agreements are a Necessity
- When clients engage us for our services, I think sometimes we don’t take the opportunity to spell out in our fee agreements how we expect our clients to treat us. Fee agreements are not only to discuss a fee. They are an opportunity for us to initiate and set our boundaries with clients. Of course, it is important to consult our (your) local State Rules of Professional Conduct in crafting a proper fee agreement tailored to one’s jurisdiction. But, I utilize some space in my fee agreement to clearly set out what behavior I won’t tolerate. This helps me introduce the idea to clients that there will be boundaries and I will enforce them.
Relationship to the Business
Being a small business owner is not for the faint of heart. The buck truly stops with you (and your partner if you are lucky enough to have one, or four!). You have got to figure out a way to keep the lights on, keep work efficiently coming out the door and taxes!!! The amount of things you need to juggle in order to keep your head above water can be daunting. Did I mention taxes??
I am still formulating a constructive plan on how I tackle boundaries when it comes to my business. From what I hear from other business owners, this is not really a thing. Since the buck stops with you, the opinion I often read about is that you really can’t have effective boundaries with your business, because in order to be successful, you have to be willing to give anything and everything to the business that it needs, whenever it needs it, to not only survive but be successful. But it is hard for me to accept that one fights that much and that hard to be their own boss to be left with a business that runs you as opposed to you running it. The issue, I think, clearly is relative to the size of business that you are running. I, along with my partner, run an extremely small business. Nonetheless, it is important to establish the boundary line between you and the business in order to remind yourself why you entered into this way of life to begin with. Here is what I have come up with so far:
- Carve out specific times you devote to accomplishing the tasks related solely toward the business, and don’t let other matters interrupt you.
- Whenever I set upon accomplishing tasks relating to the business, I don’t take client calls or work on client matters. I carve out a chunk of time where I am only working on firm business and I don’t let other matters interrupt that.
- Physically go into the office to work on business matters.
- I don’t like to carry work home, if I can help it. So what helps me maintain the boundary between the business and my personal life is specifically going into the office to work on things relating to the business. I specifically leave paperwork relating to taxes and personnel at the office to make me go into the office to access it and work on it.
- You gotta give some things away…
- I am a pretty cost conscious person. If I can save some bucks doing something myself, I will do it. However, when it comes to running a business, there are a lot of moving parts that have to work on demand in order for you to successfully get through the workday. Otherwise, you would be working all the time to achieve these tasks. So, my partner and I have a few professionals who we can call at the drop of the hat to help us. We have an IT professional and accountant who we have come to rely upon to help us with our business. In the end the expense is very much worth the time it would take away from my personal time for me or my partner to acquire the sufficient knowledge to do the task ourselves. Doing this helps with continuing to establish the boundary between me and the business so I am not always working.
Establishing boundaries are not only for my benefit. It really is also very much for the benefit of the client and the business. In addition to all the above mentioned attributes, establishing boundaries allows me as a business owner to continue to maintain perspective so my judgment regarding my cases and the business don’t get clouded too much by emotion.
Establishing boundaries is very much a constant practice for me. I don’t always succeed at the steps I have fashioned for myself, but at least I have tried to create a roadmap by which I may follow to hopefully get back on track with this particular aspect of my practice.