Leave Texting To Your Friends And Family, Not Your Lawyer

In my in-house role, I have seen interoffice communication range from the classic typed memorandum, to e-mail, and even to a simple text or an emoji.

Whether we have evolved enough as a species to now capture the same content in 140 characters that we once did in two typed memo pages remains to be seen. But despite my client’s attempts to the contrary, I can tell you the often complex legal questions posed on a daily basis simply cannot be answered in the space of a tweet.

Before you brand me a stubborn Luddite, even my in-house colleagues in Silicon Valley seem to agree with me. Facebook’s own webpage addressing legal matters runs over 1,000 words, while the king of short, Twitter, has a Legal FAQ page that clocks in at slightly over 1,800 words. Hardly 140 characters or less.

By no means am I advocating that in-house counsel use Latin or display verbosity in all of their communications — quite the contrary, as I believe you need to maintain effective communication with your client by all means necessary (including burning your Bluebook). However, for the bulk of what in-house deals with, a simple text, or even a series of texts, cannot accurately flesh out the pertinent details.

Last week I was in my office when I received the following two texts from an executive in my organization:

“R u OK with me sending r final report to CMS?”

“We met on it 2 wks ago, and u seemed OK with it.”

First of all, two weeks was about 50 meetings and 1,000 e-mails ago; I would be lying if I said I immediately recalled what he was talking about. Second of all, working in-house for a hospital network, any mention of CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) is enough to grind my day to a halt.

CMS, having oversight over more than half of a hospital’s typical patient population, has a great deal of power and authority. Anything we turn over to them has likely been reviewed and vetted by multiple individuals and traditionally is not approved via text.

Mustering all the strength I had to keep from firing back an “R U serious?!?” or “LOL,” I politely requested he give me a call so we could quickly discuss the matter. And as I had anticipated, our “quick” call turned into a 25-minute conversation, in which I was able to flesh out enough details of his request to know we would likely need to have our general counsel, CEO, and possibly our board weigh in on the matter before we simply sent our report to CMS.

Lest you think the above exchange is an outlier, in the past month I have received texts with the following phrases from a variety of my colleagues:

“Unless it is violating some sort of federal law or something…”

“If you let us pull it out of the contract and put it in an MOU, we will probably be fine.”

“Received updated contract, i think i am k to sign, or do you want to see it?”

You can bet each one of these texts received a follow-up e-mail, call, or meeting, where it became abundantly clear that if I had offered a one-word reply when asked, my conduct would have been dancing on the malpractice line.

Despite my disdain for the text, I will never discourage my colleagues from using it. Anytime they think to reach out to in-house before acting is a win in my book. But the burden falls to in-house to pick up the phone or track colleagues down in person to give a question the attention it deserves.

Failure to do so not only puts your client at risk, but potentially your license to practice law as well.  So stretch beyond 140 characters, I promise you it’s worth it.

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Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at [email protected].