Have you ever found yourself saying, “Gosh, I wish I had more time”? Between reaching out to prospective clients, preparing for hearings and representing clients in court, a day in the life of an attorney can be pretty hectic.

You might notice that it’s easy to slip up and make choices that aren’t the best during the course of the day.

While you might put it down to an error or just bad judgement, this phenomenon does have a name: Decision fatigue.

What is Decision Fatigue?

Decision fatigue is the concept that people only have a finite amount of mental energy to weigh their options, and that once it’s depleted, they will usually default to making the “safe” decision.

In a 2011 study*, researchers observed that the rate of favorable decisions made by judges decreased from 65% to nearly 0% as they approached their next break.

Upon their return to the bench, it went back up to 65%.

So what does this mean for your firm? Clearly, morning or post-lunch hearings would give you the greatest chance of winning a favorable decision for your client.

However, this is not the only way that you can use decision fatigue to your advantage. Keeping this concept in mind can also help you to retain more clients and improve your staff’s efficiency.

Client Outreach and Decision Fatigue

It’s always best to follow up with prospective claimants as soon as they reach out to your firm. However, if you can’t get ahold of them immediately, you should plan when to reach out again based on the principles of decision fatigue.

Try reaching out to claimants early on in the morning or immediately after lunch.

If your firm is focusing outreach efforts at a specific time of the day, you may want to make sure your intake staff is making calls at optimal times - in this case, early on in the morning or right after lunch.

Organizing your staff’s availability is critical to ensuring you have the best chance of getting and touch with, and hopefully signing, prospective clients who showed interest in your services.

Be Wary of Time Zones!

For national firms, it is important to keep time zones in mind. A call to a prospective client in California from a Boston-based firm would be three hours behind -- a 3PM outreach on the East Coast becomes a 12PM call on the West Coast.

If a lead is nearly out the door for lunch and his phone rings, do you think he’d answer it? Even though it might be after lunch where you are, according to the decision fatigue concept, it’s very likely that a client in a different time zone would just let it ring.

Ensuring Prompt Paperwork Returns

Decision fatigue can also have implications for clients who are already working with you but still need to return some paperwork. While it’s not a Herculean task to sign on the dotted line, seal an envelope and drop it into a mailbox, a client can still perceive this as a hassle that she can get to tomorrow rather than today.

Much like you can call leads earlier while they’re energized and ready to commit to working with you, you can address the endless problem of pending paperwork by following up with clients earlier in the day to ask them to sign and return the documents.

Alternatively, to make the process even faster, you can send out the paperwork to be signed electronically. eGeneration’s own lead and case management software, eLuminate, gives you the ability to email documents using Adobe Sign.

By taking advantage of this feature, what would be a chore for the client becomes as easy as replying to an email. eLuminate is complimentary for all of our clients who currently purchase legal leads.

The implications of decision fatigue are not only something that a practice can leverage to get a better response from prospective and current clients, but keeping these in mind can also help an entire firm as a whole.

You may find that managing your own marketing campaigns overwhelms you and is leading to making poor decisions around lunchtime. This can cause your firm to lose great cases and potential settlements.

If you’d like to supplement your current caseload while bypassing the exhaustion and effort that come with running ad campaigns, consider purchasing legal leads. We currently offer Social Security disability, workers’ compensation, personal injury, and employment law leads.

Give us a call today at 617.800.0089 to discuss pricing and availability.

*Source: Danziger, Leval, Avnaim-Pesso – Extraneous Factors In Judicial Decisions ; http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full.pdf