Is telephone legal advice as good as face-to-face?

When most people think about getting legal advice, they think about going into an office to see a lawyer.  At Affording Justice we offer legal advice by telephone and also by video-conference.  So it’s a reasonable question for our clients to ask – is telephone legal advice as good as face-to-face?

There are clear advantages to getting legal advice by telephone:

• It is convenient for the client – you don’t have to make a special trip to see the lawyer
• It allows people to get advice from anywhere – so people who live in an area where there aren’t a lot of lawyers can still get professional advice easily
• From our perspective, it is efficient and allows us to keep our costs lower so our fees are more affordable.

We maximise the effectiveness of telephone advice by using Client Only web forms.  When you book for our service we email you a link to a form you can use to give us some background about your problem and upload documents before your advice appointment.  This structured approach ensures we have the information we need to provide you with advice, and also makes the service more efficient, again meaning we can keep our fees more affordable.

Research shows that telephone services are more effective if they are followed up with something in writing. So for all of our telephone services, we email you our lawyer’s notes of your instructions, their advice to you, and the steps you need to take next.

Of course, communicating by telephone is different to face-to-face, but we have many years of experience in providing telephone services and know the how to make telephone communication as effective as possible.

Even so, there are some circumstances in which telephone advice is not appropriate.  Some legal issues are simply too complex to deal with over the phone, and some clients have special communication needs that cannot be met by telephone. We won’t provide you with telephone advice if we don’t think it is appropriate.  Instead, we will refer you to other lawyers who provide a face-to-face service.