Communication, communication, communication

So, there ends yet another financial year. I find myself 12 months older, pretty exhausted and prone to inadvertent twitching if anyone mentions words such as target or bill.

Unfortunately for me, the last week of the financial year was particularly tricky as my huge mediation which was postponed by January's snow could only be rescheduled for my last working day of the year, and in the week prior to that I had a non-chargeable day out of the office in London which I needed like a hole in the head.

In any event, the momentous date which is 30 April has now been and gone and the world still appears to be turning. There will follow a very short hiatus at work as the pennies are counted, smashed targets acknowledged and the daily billing thermometer is taken down from the homepage of our intranet. Time to draw a collective breath will be limited before we receive the annual 'thank you for all your hard work this year' email from the managing partner. That will end with a message along the lines of 'onwards and upwards troops, let's take that va va voom into the new financial year and see whether we can't do even better in 2011'. And here we go again...

The silent type

It's been a month of uncommunicative opponents. One lady will not take my calls and only corresponds by letter, albeit on a high-tech level as they are scanned and emailed to me. Some are just a few lines long, leading me to wonder how much faster and cheaper it would have been for her to bang out an email herself. That approach would also elicit a more rapid response from me, as I print out her emailed letters and place them in a traditional to-do pile at the right hand side of my desk. Emails are somehow an altogether different animal which burn holes in my inbox until answered.

Then there's a guy who is adopting a blanket 'ignore her and she'll go away' approach to me. I have news for him, however, as I can be quite pesky and will call daily before escalating to emails and faxes should that elicit no response. It will be my mission to grind him down until he ultimately has to acknowledge my existence.

You may wonder why I'm being so persistent. Well, the gentleman in question is the solicitor for a claimant company which thought it had a case against my client worth close to £500,000 a couple of years back according to the letter of claim. We responded with a kick-ass letter of response pointing out the numerous gaping holes in the claim and supporting evidence. There have since been almost two years of total silence. That could be taken as a positive sign that the opposition has been quelled into submission, or on a paranoid day one could assume that they are off sneakily building a Trojan horse ready to surprise us with (or more probably issuing proceedings). Limitation will not cause them a problem for over a year yet and I daren't recommend closing the file altogether as that may jinx it into reviving.

So, has the claimant run out of steam or money, or is it preparing an ambush? In this case, there appears to be a cash issue as a Companies House check has just revealed that the claimant is in liquidation. I'm not hanging out the bunting just yet though as those liquidator types can sometimes rear up and bite you by making a claim on a company's behalf, but it is certainly a positive development from my client's point of view.

Keeping it short

At a client event recently I was chatting with insurance claims handlers who said that they are always ridiculously busy and a little sick, to be honest, of solicitors asking why they do not yet have a response to their 18-page report which was only sent through the previous day. While it may well be a labour of love to the solicitor who crafted it and lived and breathed the facts of the case while doing so, we do need to step back and try to see it in the context of receipt by the client, who has not been sat there twiddling their thumbs while waiting for said masterpiece.

I have worked with many insurers over the years and reported in their various standard formats. The toughest one for verbose little me required just a one-page summary at the front of each report. If it spilled onto a second page, even by just one line, there was one claims handler who would send it back unread!

It's a fairly basic customer service tip, really. Ask the client what their preference is. I bet that few would opt for the thesis of a report with each 't' crossed and 'i' dotted '“ at the end of the day they have to sit there and digest it. They are entitled to assume that all solicitors whom they instruct will be clued up and make some sensible suggestions for case strategy and the like. We will all wine and dine them on occasion, take trouble to remember what their dog is called and which football team they support, so to stand out it's probably best to give them what they want.

I'm off to work on brevity. Not one of my strong points.