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Which way to reach us, and when

All of these reach the same people. They differ in how fast they get you a useful answer:

• Text a photo, for anything printed. A ticket, a court notice, a letter from an insurer. Front and back. It is the fastest route by a distance, because we can read the thing itself rather than a description of it.
• Call, when there is a date coming up, or when you are not sure whether you have a problem at all. That second one is a perfectly good reason to call and it costs nothing.
• The form or email, when it is not urgent, or when it is easier to write it out than to explain it on the phone.
• The practice addresses above, traffic, bankruptcy and real estate each have their own inbox, and using the right one skips a forwarding step.

What to have in front of you

Not required. It just makes the first conversation worth more:

• The date it happened, and the date on any paper you were given. Deadlines run from one or the other and they are rarely the same.
• Whatever you were handed or sent, ticket, accident report, court notice, the papers you were served, the letter from the insurer. The envelope too, if you still have it.
• Which town it happened in, which decides the court.
• Whether anyone has already contacted you about it, and whether you said anything to them.

If you have none of that, call anyway. Waiting until you have assembled a file is how the short deadlines get missed.

What happens after you send something

Somebody reads it, usually the same business day. If it is a ticket you will normally get a straight answer about what it carries before you have to respond to it. If it is an injury or a divorce, the next step is a conversation rather than an email, because the useful questions depend on your answers.

If it turns out you do not need a lawyer, that is what you will be told. It happens often enough to be worth saying out loud.

One thing to be careful about

Until we have agreed to act for you, we are not yet your lawyers, and sending information does not by itself create that relationship. There is also a practical reason to keep the first message brief: we cannot act against an existing client’s interests, so before we can take a matter on we have to check that the other side is not already someone we represent.

So the first message is better as what kind of problem, when, and where than as the full account. There is time for the rest once we have confirmed we can act.

If it is urgent

Some things genuinely cannot wait for an email reply:

• A court date in the next few days, or one you have already missed.
• An arrest, or the possibility of one.
• An injury claim where a municipality might be involved, a town road, a county vehicle, a school district. That drops the deadline to ninety days, and it passes before most people have thought about a lawyer.

Call rather than write for any of those.

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