Bench & Bar January/February 2025

LAWYER WELL-BEING

Accessibility BY DR. ERIC Y. DROGIN

I t is axiomatic that—in modern par lance—“lawyers who represent themselves have a fool for a client.” This saying is ascribed to Abraham Lincoln. Of course, what saying isn’t? Honest Abe got around, but in order to have spent the night everywhere he is alleged to have slept and to have unleashed every barb he is alleged to uttered, he would have had to fake his own demise at Ford’s Theater, Jim Morrison style, and continue his tour of future bed and-breakfast establishments for another 75 years, churning out a few pithy one-liners at every stop. All of this by way of highlighting the notion that there is a fate worse than having a fool for a client. One could, after all, have no clients at all. It is important to have a lit erally winning way with juries, to dress for success, and to claim with a straight face a career replete with far more successes than

practitioners as “not having to take family law cases anymore”—then another concern rears its head: how to transition from estab lishing visibility to managing accessibility. It turns out that “there are only 24 hours in a day” is more than just a cliché, that entities designed to regulate our practices quickly become testy when we bill more than 24 hours a day, and that the ability we devel oped to forego sleep for seemingly days at a time is the stuff of increasingly distant memory. Ironically, existing clients may infer avoid ance when what counsel is really attempting to do is to be as accessible as possible. One fraught situation, in this age of multiple devices, can occur when we attempt to reserve a single telephone number in order to be reached virtually around the clock. Clients who return calls automatically to numbers from which they have been called

failures, but without sufficient foot traffic the most gifted of advocates will soon be looking for another line of work. There are more ways to reach out than ever before, and an ever-expanding host of would-be facilitators competing to assist us in extending our reach. Those of us with websites are incessantly exposed to exhor tations to improve them. To glance at such invitations with even idle curiosity is often to be amazed by their garbled content. This isn’t necessarily because the authors can’t spell, type, or see their screens clearly; rather, this may represent a fairly effective method of dodging spam filters that zero in on phrases like “develop business,” “increase contacts,” and “get customers.” Once we find that we have enough suitably flush clients to make a decent go of it—a state of grace often defined by criminal

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