Deciding Whether To Travel For Clients

Last year, I wrote an article about how it often makes sense to hire local counsel rather than to travel for clients in some circumstances. Travel time can add costs for clients, and if a lawyer is not admitted in a given jurisdiction, it might be better to have local counsel handle a case rather than pro hac into a jurisdiction and handle a matter in a faraway forum. However, in some circumstances, it might make sense for a lawyer to travel several hours to complete work for a client rather than task local counsel with a given matter.

Administrative Issues

Whenever a client hires a new lawyer, administrative issues need to be hashed out before a lawyer can take a case. One sticking point is that a new lawyer usually will require an advance retainer payment even if the new lawyer simply needs to make a quick court appearance for a client or complete some other simple task. Of course, it makes sense that a lawyer would not trust that a new client would pay the lawyer’s bills and insist that an advance retainer be paid.

However, clients often do not like to pay advance retainers. Even though retainer payments are often refundable if they are not used on legal fees, clients know that lawyers find a way of justifying why they spent enough time to keep the retainer payments. Depending on how much a local counsel wishes to charge for an advance retainer payment, a client might be willing to pay their usual lawyer for travel costs associated with completing a legal task a few hours away.

Urgency

In certain circumstances, clients do not have much notice before they need to appear in court or attend to some legal matter. Some exigent legal proceedings, including stays and some eviction matters, require action immediately, and clients may only give lawyers a day or two of notice that a legal matter needed to be handled. In such circumstances, a client’s typical lawyer may need to handle a matter since there is simply not enough time to onboard local counsel.

Before a lawyer can handle a case, they typically need to do conflicts checks to make sure that a matter does not conflict with other work handled by a firm. Although this should be an easy process, some larger firms have numerous clients they need to cross-check, and this can take time. Also, it can take time for a retainer payment to clear, and some lawyers may not work on a matter until they know that a payment has cleared. In such circumstances, a client’s usual lawyer may need to jump on a matter even though excessive travel time is involved.

Institutional Knowledge

Some clients use one law firm for all of their work spread across multiple jurisdictions. Indeed, my own law firm handled work all across the states in which we practice for our clients so that the client only has one lawyer they need to deal with for all of their legal work. It can sometimes be difficult to bring new lawyers up to speed on a matter so that they can be as effective as possible in court.

In such circumstances, it might make sense to have a client’s typical lawyer travel to a court appearance to advocate on a client’s behalf. The additional expense associated with traveling might be worth it since bringing a new lawyer up to speed would also come at a cost. In addition, the client’s typical lawyer might be able to advocate better for a client because of their wealth of knowledge about a client’s affairs.

Personally, I always handle work for clients if the travel time is around two hours or less, and I’ll handle anything within driving distance in some circumstances. Certain situations might require the involvement of a client’s typical lawyer rather than hiring local counsel to cut down on transportation costs.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.

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