CHAPTER 1 - 1-4 DILIGENCE

• Jurisdiction: United States

1-4 Diligence

A lawyer must act with reasonable diligence and promptness.⁹⁵ This may require that the lawyer take reasonable efforts to expedite litigation.⁹⁶ Diligence issues continue to be a major source of client dissatisfaction and grievance complaints.⁹⁷ Often, however, the complaint stems not from actual lack of diligence but from poor client management which allows the client to believe that the lawyer is not pursing her case diligently. Diligence cases often also include a lack of communication issue.

A lawyer's duty to diligently pursue a client's matter continues until the representation is terminated. In Statewide Grievance Committee v. Gifford, a lawyer was found to have been properly disciplined, including for a violation of Rule 1.3, where he abandoned a client's case when he believed that pursuing it further would have placed him in jeopardy of a violation of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.⁹⁸

Grievance complaints claiming a lack of diligence do not result in probable cause findings if the lawyer can show a pattern of attention to the matter. Often, diligence complaints are coupled with complaints related to communication. When a lawyer stops communicating with his client, it is natural for the client to assume that nothing is being done on the matter. Clients often do not realize that in many courts the model of "hurry up and wait" controls case flow, and often nothing can be done to move a matter until it is reached in due course. It is a lawyer's duty to communicate that information to his client.

Each year brings new cases where the lawyer has neglected or abandoned the client and discipline is imposed, sometimes on the court's own motion.⁹⁹ This may relate to the profile of the typical lawyer in trouble than it does to any other source. For years, the profile of the respondent lawyer in discipline jeopardy was a middle-aged male in a solo or small firm practice. As often as not, in addition to client issues, there were mental health (depression, stress, exhaustion) issues as well as substance (alcohol, drugs) or process abuse (gambling, compulsive behavior) issues. Often there would also be a family issue (divorce, mid-life crisis) and many times there were physical ailments (aging, dementia, heart attack, stroke). The typical "suffering" lawyer presented with a multitude of problems operating on many different axes, and the Covid pandemic only accentuated already existing problems. When viewed in this context, the...