Last week, I was waiting for valet service to return my car (not a regular occurrence, which makes the forthcoming narration possible), and I was just sort of hanging out outside without a whole lot going on. So, I started shuffling through the business cards I was given that day, because I don’t have a smartphone upon which to play Candy Crush or do SnapChat. In an unscientific survey (but, probably an accurate one — mathematically, at least), I discovered that every card I was given had a fax line listed.
. . . which begs the question: Do any of these attorneys actually want me to send them a fax? My educated guess would be that, if I did, their reactions could be placed somewhere along the continuum of disappointment → disgust → indignation → psychotic rage. I mean, even if you’re an elderlaw attorney (and even ignoring the fact that you’ll most often be dealing with the children of elders), do you really need to provide a fax line? If people want to fax you, won’t they ask? Haven’t email attachments taken up the slack for the fax? Will anyone actually make the decision to retain an attorney based on whether that attorney has offered up a fax line or not? No way. So, why is the fax number a ubiquitous business card line item?
Well, it’s probably because, each time since 1977 that the decision to reprint business cards has come up, the attorney in charge of such things has approved the existing design and inclusions in reliance upon nothing more than a cursory glance. Certainly, this is a function of many things, including the general busyness to which a lawyer is subjected, and the existence of the traditional law firm decision matrix that anything outside of billable work is not worthy of depth of consideration. But, there is another pervasive aspect of that kind of oldthink at play here, too: the default mechanism that ‘it’s the way we’ve always done it’. It starts with seconding a choice made the prior year; and then, like an advancing root system, it comes to dominate multiple decision trees. This method of managing (or, not managing, as it were) eventually becomes subconscious; and then, your firm is on autopilot, hurtling toward stagnation.
Sure, it’s just a fax number; but, if it’s not on your business card for a specific, identifiable (reasonable) reason, it may be symptomatic of a larger issue creeping through your law firm management technique.
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