My wife wants to know what I want for lunch. A simple question, right? So why can’t I give her a simple answer? Why do I say, “I don’t know?”
Because I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. I need to consider my options.
What did I have for breakfast? What time is dinner? Do we have any cool leftovers? What sounds good to me?
You’re a lawyer. You know the routine.
Oh, I’ll have an answer eventually. It’s just lunch, after all. But my wife is busy and can’t wait for me to go through my decision making process. “How about a turkey sandwich?” she’ll say, or even better, “Would you like turkey or roast beef?”
Smart girl I married.
She knows I think like a lawyer. Lawyers say things like “I don’t know,” “I need to think about it,” and “it depends”. And, just when you think we’ve finally answered your question, we go and spoil it by saying, “on the other hand. . .”
If you ask my wife about this subject, I think she would tell you that the most frustrating thing I do is answer questions with a question.
Why do I do that? I don’t know, why do you ask?
Holy crap, I must be annoying.
Okay, here’s the thing. If the people who love us find our lawyer ways difficult, what must our clients think? They hire us to answer questions and provide solutions. Hearing us say, “I don’t know” must be a little off putting.
What we need to do is school our clients and prospects so that they understand how our minds work. We need to educate them that when we don’t have an immediate answer, when we go back and forth with on the one hand and on the other, we’re going through a natural process of weighing the possibilities and reasoning our way to a conclusion.
We’ll have an answer for them. It just might take awhile.
It might be easier to keep all of this to ourselves and answer their questions after we’ve done our brain voodoo. Maybe send them a letter. But do we really want to make it look like our job is easy? They ask, we answer, done?
I don’t think so. For one thing, it’s not easy. Thinking is hard work. And there are lots of issue to consider. And we want our clients to know that. We want them to see that even though it might not look like it, we’re working hard for them.
But we should explain that we’re not avoiding their questions or trying to give them a hard time. We’re doing our job.
Someone once said that we shouldn’t let our clients see us sweat, and that’s true. But we also don’t want them to think that our job is easy. We want them to know that we put a lot of effort into what we do, because in addition to results, effort is what they’re paying for.
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