The best qualities in a client can be summarized by three traits:

Best Quality #1: Clients who always keep all of their medical appointments with physicians.

Unfortunately, many clients are far more concerned with the outcome of their lawsuit, or how much money they may recover, than such a simple thing as keeping their medical appointments. When clients fail to keep their medical appointments, it tells me that they simply don’t care–not just about their case, mort importantly, they don’t care about themselves.

Juries do not tolerate plaintiffs who do not make their best effort to recover from their injury and the worst thing that a plaintiff can do is to miss medical appointments. The jury will always hold this against you.

Best Quality #2: Clients who do not smoke.

Juries can’t stand smokers!! While smoking is highly addictive and a habit that is extremely difficult to kick, jurors have no patience for smokers. If you smoke, the message to the jury is simple: I do not care about my health. If you do not care enough about your health to quit smoking, how can you expect that a jury will care about your health?

Even worse, clients sometimes smoke outside the courthouse while jurors walk by them. This reinforces the message that you are unconcerned about your health and hence, why should the jurors care about you? STOP SMOKING.

Best Quality #3: Clients willing to invest their time for their case.

Some clients hate spending the time with me to prepare for various parts of their case, such as preparation needed for a deposition. It is crucial to our cases that the clients meet with me at least twice to prepare for their deposition and if the case involves an accident, the client must visit the accident scene with me and reconstruct the accident step by step. Few clients want to spend their valuable time doing these things.

If you don’t have the time or desire to prepare for your deposition or your trial testimony, then the case is not important to you. PREPARATION IS THE KEY! With thorough preparation, you will be prepared for every question asked at your deposition and your anxiety will be reduced by leaps and bounds. Your job actually becomes much easier through preparation, but you must be prepared to make a commitment of your time and energy.

These are the top three qualities of my favorite clients.