LEGAL REPRESENTATION IS A TEAM EFFORT

Some wise man (or woman) once said, there are no stupid questions only stupid answers.

When your law practice is limited to one area of the law – such as elder law – you tend to hear the same questions again and again. “I thought my mother was ineligible for Medicaid for three years?” “I thought I could only gift $10,000 a year?” “What’s a durable power of attorney? I want my power of attorney to be durable, don’t I?”

There are probably fifty questions that I hear on a regular basis. Two or three of those fifty questions I hear daily. It would seem that when it comes to my chosen field of practice, everyone harbors the same misconceptions. As those of you who read my column on a regular basis know, I have tried to dispel the more persistent misconceptions by writing columns about the reality behind the misconception.

I’d be lying if I said I take great pleasure in discussing a misconception with a client every time one is mentioned. How many times could any person possibly enjoy telling someone the truth behind the “I can only gift $10,000 a year” misconception?

But my clients, or any lawyer’s client, should not fear asking a question. Every year I have hundreds of new clients. (Soon, I’ll probably be able to say thousands of new clients.) Some ask lots of questions, some none at all.

Yet, as many times as I may have discussed the same questions with a different client – or sometimes, even the same client on multiple occasions – I can tell you that it is far better for a client to ask questions, then not. Clients who don’t ask questions scare me a bit, particularly when the issue for which I am representing them involves work over an extended period of time.

For instance, when I represent a client for purposes of Medicaid planning (Medicaid is the primary government program that pays for long-term care, such as care at home, in an assisted living residence, or in a nursing home), I typically have contact with my client – or one of his family members – for many months, sometimes years. A client who never calls my office to ask a question or just to check in to make sure what he is doing is correct could easily be going down the wrong path, failing to do something correctly or doing something incorrectly.

I have noticed that people often hear what they want to hear or hear things that weren’t ever said. A lawyer might tell a client to do one thing, and the client ends up doing something different – even doing something diametrically opposed to what the lawyer said the client should do. If you asked the client why he did what he did, he’d say, “My lawyer told me to do it.”

Miscommunication is commonplace in legal representation. If for no other reason, it is because of this high probability for miscommunication that a client should check-in with his lawyer from time-to-time.

A client might not want to do this for any number of reasons – he might feel that he understands what he’s suppose to do, he might not want to bother the lawyer who he perceives as being too busy to answer his mundane question. But the fact of the matter is, when a client starts down an incorrect course, the consequences of that mistake can be serious. Any lawyer worth his salt would much rather handle a five-minute, mundane questions-and-answer session, then deal with a significant problem that might only be able to be solved at a high cost to his client.

Your lawyer works for you. What a lawyer “sell” is his advice. If you have a question, ask it. It’s better to ask a dumb question then engage in wrong actions that you thought were helpful but were actually anything but.

If you find yourself asking the same question over-and-over again and you can’t understand the answer or don’t believe the answer – ask the lawyer to write the answer down. If you still don’t understand the answer or you don’t believe it to be true, maybe you’ll have to take a leap of faith and believe that your lawyer understands the subject matter better than you. Or maybe you’ll have to ask another lawyer for a second opinion.

But you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t ask.

Complex decisions rarely fall on a single set of shoulders. When multiple people are involved, coordination becomes just as important as the plan itself. Clear communication can help keep everyone moving in the same direction.