In-House Counsel

Be A Pragmatic Attorney

Remember to balance the risk of a hypothetical legal challenge to the very real risk of turning off the interest of a customer or consumer.

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I recently accompanied my spouse to one of her physician’s appointments at a physician’s office located in one of the hospitals for which I serve as in-house counsel.

As we walked to the counter, she was handed a clipboard with the obligatory dozen or so forms which needed to be reviewed, signed, and initialed prior to her appointment. My wife has been seen by several physicians in our hospital network over the past year, but nevertheless, she was asked to again review the same forms she had seen a number of times before.

Whether it is because we were running late or that she had finally had enough with signing forms, she quickly thrust the clipboard into my arms and demanded I fill them out. As she walked to her chair in the waiting room, she remarked how frustrating to was to have to fill out the same form each time she went to the physician despite having filled the same ones out a few days prior.

A smart husband would have sympathized with her frustration and moved on. A smart husband would have acknowledged the waste and redundancy caused by filling out the same forms days apart.

But I am no smart husband.

As a loyal attorney to my client, and the author of at least one of the forms in the stack on her clipboard, I took the opportunity to explain the importance of filing out the forms each and every time our hospital tends to a patient.

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Big mistake.

After I presented what I felt to be a robust defense of my client and its practices, she, in typical mic drop fashion, cooly remarked “that if I was as good as attorney as I claimed to be, I wouldn’t need a million signed forms to present to a judge in the one-off event our hospital were ever sued.”

Legally, I still maintain I am right. It is, without a doubt, the safest course of action to have one stack of signed and dated forms associated with every time a patient receives services. This greatly mitigates the chance a patient can claim they lacked knowledge of our policies or procedures or dispute an invoice down the road.

But pragmatically, it was hard to disagree with my wife’s argument. In arguably what is a time of need for our patients and their families, couldn’t we make it just a bit easier and less onerous to receive medical attention?

Whether you work as in-house counsel in the medical field or in Biglaw and advise clients how to interact with their customers, odds are you have developed at least one bureaucratic or burdensome step in the name of protecting your client from a future legal challenge.

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Sure, I bet that extra step is legally helpful. But remember to balance the risk of a hypothetical legal challenge to the very real risk of turning off the interest of a customer or consumer.

Never shy away from shielding your client from legal risk, but always remember to do it in a pragmatic way.

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].

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