When it comes to litigation, much of the practice is designated to communications with opposing counsel, co-counsel, a mediator, a court and, of course, a jury. In my experience, lawyers rarely find themselves in the crosshairs of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel for alleged shortcomings concerning their lack of communicative efforts in those settings. Court-mandated deadlines largely force lawyers to timely communicate with their adversaries and the court. However, these same deadlines can, at times, cause lawyers to overlook, or worse, ignore, certain important tenets: the duty to keep clients reasonably informed about the status of their case, to "promptly comply with reasonable requests for information" and to ensure that clients are positioned to make informed decisions concerning the representation. See Pa. R.P.C. 1.4. It is easy to imagine a situation where a lawyer is working under an impending deadline in one matter when a case update request arrives from a client in an unrelated matter. It is also easy to imagine that, in such a scenario, the lawyer overlooks (or ignores) the update request. Doing so may ultimately trigger the ignored client to file a complaint with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel and, in my experience, Disciplinary Counsel does not treat these types of complaints lightly, especially if it is shown that the lawyer has engaged in a pattern of snubbing clients' update requests. Certain best practices can help lawyers protect themselves against this type of risk.

The predominance of e-filing, at least in theory, should assist lawyers in keeping clients reasonably informed about the status of their cases. As part of a lawyer's internal operating procedures, a lawyer would be well advised to have a person within the office specifically designated to forward clients all e-filed documents upon receipt. This can be accomplished with a few mouse clicks and should help ensure the client is kept informed about the status of the case, while at the same time potentially reduce the frequency that a client may submit the lawyer update requests.