Technology and competitive pressure to be a client's go-to adviser, and heightened awareness of work-life balance and mental health wellness in the legal profession: Are these forces working against each other?

There's likely no easy answer, but it's nevertheless clear that lawyers have adapted over the past decade-plus. Practitioners approach all-hours accessibility as a fact of life at this point, but also warn that managing client expectations is key in making sure they ultimately get the proper advice.

Or, as one practitioner put it, be “responsive without being irresponsible.”

When it comes to client responsiveness, distinguishing “business days” from the weekend is “a very quaint notion,” said Vito Gagliardi Jr., managing partner of Porzio, Bromberg & Newman in Morristown—because responsiveness matters to clients even more than cost.

Still, “no one should attempt to give sophisticated legal advice via text,” and sometimes it's “up to us to put the brakes on things,” he said.

“Responding quickly is different from responding substantially quickly,” Gagliardi said. “'We're looking into it' is a response.”

Patrick Dunican Jr., managing partner of Gibbons in Newark, said there's client pressure and hard work to contend with, but that's always been the case in legal practice.

In the modern era, though, “There's nowhere to hide—that's the biggest difference,” he said.

“When we first had the Blackberries, we said, it's important that you respond to the clients,” Dunican recalled. “Let the client know that you have the question. … But we don't want people shooting out the answer.”

A recent Law.com article by Patrick Krill, a lawyer and mental health counselor, warned that, when clients tell their lawyer, “'Just make it happen,' it would seem, in a sense, like they are simply signaling their confidence and bestowing their praise.” But, he wrote, “In reality, the timeline may be disastrously unreasonable, the expectations inhumane, and the assignment itself utterly unclear but, damn it, they know you'll come through.”

Krill added that the “unacknowledged and significant costs of 'just make it happen' are rising, and our boundaries of what's acceptable are slipping.”

That's a quality-of-life issue for the lawyer, sure, but there also are potential ethical implications, according to one New Jersey ethics lawyer—and that can be bad for client and lawyer alike.

Competitive pressure for immediate responsiveness and constant availability “sounds in ethics because of the fact that the ethics system is largely a consumer protection organization,” which has maintained authority over attorney-client interactions as those interactions have shifted over time, said Marc Garfinkle of Morristown, whose practice is devoted to attorney ethics and related matters.

The Rules of Professional Conduct require that an attorney respond promptly to a client, and lack of responsiveness is a common charge in an attorney discipline case.

“'Promptly' meant something else” in eras of correspondence by mail, phone and fax, Garfinkle said.

Ethically, lack of accuracy is likely a greater risk than lack of promptness, Garfinkle said. “It's principally a question of diligence—are we sacrificing diligence?”

It could happen, Garfinkle said.

“In a field where attorneys are really competing for that client or that phone call … being first to pick up the phone is very important,” he said.

“It might affect the quality of the work. … Getting the client has become more important in some ways than representing the client,” Garfinkle said—a “sad commentary.”

“We have to be circumspect, we have to be intelligent, we have to be right—that's a big one—and sometimes that takes time,” he said.

Paul Marino, managing partner of Day Pitney's New Jersey office, said, “I really do think it's a differentiating factor for clients. They really want to know they can reach you.”

He added, “there's pressure to give answers as quickly as possible.”

When Marino started practicing in 2002, email already was pervasive, so the shift to constant accessibility has seemed more “gradual” than sudden, he said. “Personally, I check my email before I go to bed and I check it when I wake up in the morning.”

At Day Pitney, “it's addressed with our attorneys in general, that we expect [them] to be extremely responsive,” Marino said. “But you've got to be responsive without being irresponsible.”

“I think everybody's kind of in the same boat with this,” Marino added, noting that it's “up to us to set expectations.”

Expectations depend on the client and the type of case. And demanding immediate assistance can be reasonable in certain contexts, he said, such as in a situation where a court issues an order to show cause.

What's reasonable, Porzio's Gagliardi pointed out, is largely subjective. When it comes to email, “my sense of what's important is less relevant than the sender's sense of what's important,” he said.

“If you're measuring reasonableness by what the marketplace expects,” then a high level of responsiveness is reasonable, Gagliardi said. “It's capable of affecting your practice if you let it.”

But responding to a client's email at 10:30 p.m. on a Thursday, or at 1 p.m. on a Sunday?

“At this point,” he said, “clients expect that.”