From inside the firm, nothing has gone wrong. The searches are ordered, the enquiries are out, and the file is waiting on someone else to do their part, which is how most legal work runs. A local authority, a lender, the other side’s solicitor, a registry. It’s an ordinary lull, and the fee earner knows exactly where things stand.

From the client’s side, it looks rather different. It’s been nearly two weeks since they heard anything. Their estate agent is asking for news, the removals firm wants a date, and the mortgage broker has emailed twice. They start to wonder whether something’s gone wrong, whether they were meant to send something, or whether their file has simply been forgotten.

Same two weeks. Two very different experiences.

Why silence feels longer than it is

We’re not psychologists, but David Maister thought hard about this. As well as writing Managing the Professional Service Firm, he wrote The Psychology of Waiting Lines, a paper about why some waits feel far longer than others. His central point is that how long a wait feels often has little to do with how long it actually lasts.

Three of his principles fit a quiet stretch in a legal matter almost exactly:

Uncertain waits feel longer than known, finite ones.

Maister’s example is a doctor’s waiting room: a patient who is told “the doctor is running thirty minutes late” soon settles into the wait. While another is told “The doctor will be free soon” spends the whole time on edge. “We’re waiting on the searches” is the legal version of “soon”.

Unexplained waits feel longer than explained ones.

If a client doesn’t know why nothing is happening, they fill the gap themselves, and rarely with the most reassuring explanation.

Anxiety makes any wait feel longer.

Most clients come to a solicitor in the middle of something that matters a great deal to them, whether that’s a house move, a bereavement or a dispute. Two weeks feels very different when your moving date depends on it.

The days themselves are only part of it. What makes a quiet fortnight feel long is everything the client can’t see: where the matter is, when they’ll hear next, and how much longer it might take.

Why the update so often doesn’t get sent

At this point, it’s fair to ask whether the answer is simply to send more emails. Nobody wants to write, or read, a message with nothing new in it. Committing to a timescale you don’t control feels risky. And there’s always something more pressing on the desk, usually the legal work the client is actually paying for.

Those are sensible instincts, and they explain why updates slip in firms that care a great deal about their clients. They rest on one assumption, though: that an update is only worth sending when something has changed.

For a client in the middle of a quiet stretch, the most useful thing to hear is that nothing has gone wrong, that someone is still on it, and when they’ll hear next. That takes a couple of lines. It also answers the question they were about to ring up and ask anyway.

What the Legal Ombudsman looks for

There’s a firmer reason to send it, too. The Legal Ombudsman has published guidance on third-party delays, and it’s reassuring on one point and pointed on another.

The reassuring part: the Ombudsman says it won’t generally hold firms responsible for delays they didn’t cause and couldn’t have avoided, such as waiting on HM Land Registry, the Probate Registry, the courts or an expert. The pointed part is what it looks at instead: whether the firm did what it reasonably could to move things along, and how it communicated with the client in the meantime.

One of its own case studies shows how that plays out. A medical expert was months late with a report on a personal injury claim. The delay wasn’t the firm’s fault, but it had chased the expert only once in five months and hadn’t kept the client updated. The Ombudsman directed it to pay the client £200, and a case fee was charged.

Its expectations are specific. Firms should explain why a matter is delayed, keep progressing other parts of it where they can, give the client an idea of how long the delay might last, and tell them if that changes. Where a timescale genuinely can’t be given, the client should be told that too. And where chasing a third party will cost the client money, the Ombudsman expects that to be discussed with them.

Put simply, a firm is rarely blamed for the wait. It’s the silence around the wait that turns into a complaint.

What a good holding update looks like

A holding update doesn’t need to be long or polished. Built around what the Ombudsman expects, a good one usually covers six things:

• Where things stand. One line on the current position.
• What you’re waiting on. The third party involved, named, so the client knows the pause has a cause.
• What you’ve done about it. Any chasing, and anything else that’s moved forward in the meantime.
• When things might move. A rough timescale, or an honest note that you can’t say yet, and why.
• Costs. Any cost implications, or a line confirming there aren’t any.
• The next update. When the client will hear from you again.

In practice, that can be as short as this:

A quick note on where things are. We’re still waiting on the local authority search, which we ordered on Monday 5 October. The council is currently quoting around three weeks, so we’d expect it back towards the end of the month. We chased it last week, and in the meantime we’ve raised our enquiries on the draft contract. There’s nothing you need to do for now, and no change to costs. We’ll be in touch again by Friday 23 October, or sooner if the search comes in.

That last line does more work than it looks. It turns an open-ended wait into a known one, which is Maister’s first principle in practice. The client no longer has to wonder when they’ll hear, because they’ve been told.

Making it a habit rather than a good intention

Most fee earners already know the update matters. The hard part is remembering to send it in a week full of deadlines, which is why it helps to take memory out of it.

Setting expectations at the start.

A line in the opening stages explaining that quiet stretches are normal, and roughly when they tend to happen, means the first one doesn’t come as a surprise. It’s also one of the Ombudsman’s own suggestions for preventing complaints.

Mapping the predictable pauses.

Every practice area has them: searches and mortgage offers in conveyancing, the grant in probate, expert reports in litigation. Once they’re written down, they stop being surprises for the firm as well.

Planning updates around those points.

If a holding update sits on the file as a task when the searches go out, nobody has to remember it.

Keeping a short template.

With the six points above as a starting frame, an update takes a couple of minutes to write rather than twenty.

Something to think about

How long could one of your clients go without hearing anything before anyone at the firm noticed? For most firms, the honest answer is that nobody is tracking it, which is exactly why it’s worth asking.

It’s one of the questions we explored in our new research with YouGov, across 1,373 consumers, business clients and law firm partners. Firms believed 86.8% of their clients would rate them well on keeping them informed. Consumer clients put it at 59.8%, and business clients at 72.6%. The full picture, including why clients leave and what keeps them, is in The Cost of Silence.