Lawyers know all too well that job demands for attorneys can cause increased levels of stress  that lead to serious health problems. But what happens when client impatience, combined with the increased speed of communications, leads to errors affecting the bottom line?

It's a very real problem affecting attorneys at all levels, according to David Friedman, litigation partner in the Stamford office of Murtha Cullina who said in an interview this week that the modes of communication people use today can contribute to costly errors. He noted that client demands for instantaneous answers, combined with technology that allows lawyers to give them, creates an environment in which mistakes can easily be made.

“We often get calls from clients who want instantaneous answers, and they'll send a complex document, that's been created by someone else's lawyer, and you're looking at it on your iPhone,” Friedman said. “It's difficult. You're struggling to read it, enlarging different parts of it, and it's hard because you're not looking at the whole page. You don't necessarily pick up everything you're supposed to pick up and you may miss some critical things that you wouldn't miss at your desk. I've seen a few cases and situations where the problem was the lawyer was using the iPhone to look at complicated documents.” With the smaller format, cellphones don't always pick up the red-lining, or corrections, that invariably appear in certain documents in desktop mode, making review even more difficult.