Your Engagement Letter Is Doing Less Work Than It Should

The lawyer found out when the broadcast aired (or worse, a day later). And there was nothing in the engagement letter about it. Because there never is.

That’s a scenario ABA Formal Opinion 523 is designed to prevent, but the more interesting question it raises isn’t about muzzling the client. It’s about what engagement agreements are doing for the relationship, beyond protecting the firm.

Most engagement letters cover fees, billing increments, and the conditions under which a lawyer can withdraw, which are necessary. Most of what’s in them reads as a risk management committee wrote them… a decade ago. And nobody has touched them since.

The Document Nobody Thinks Is a Client-Facing Document

The engagement agreement is the first substantive thing a new client receives after deciding to entrust you with their problem. They’re reading whatever you send them with more attention than they’ll give almost anything else in the relationship. That’s the moment most firms hand them a document that reads like fine print.

Research from Case Status’s 2025 Legal Client Experience Report found that 72% of attorneys describe their firm as “caring,” while only 40% of clients agree. That’s a huge perception gap that begins at the outset when neither party has gotten around to saying how the relationship is actually supposed to work.

What You Can Put in There (That You’re Not)

Opinion 523 confirms that engagement letters can include client obligations beyond payment, specifically ones tied to the representation itself, and that failing to meet them substantially can, after reasonable warning, form the basis for withdrawal under Model Rule 1.16(b)(5). The press statement provision is the opinion’s most vivid example, and it’s worth taking seriously: a client who calls a reporter without telling the lawyer is not a hypothetical.

The more useful frame, though, isn’t withdrawal. It’s clarity.

Communication cadence (i.e., who the client calls, how quickly they can expect a response, whether to use email or phone) prevents the slow-burn frustration that comes from both sides operating on different assumptions. Most clients have never been told how their lawyer prefers to work, and most lawyers never ask upfront how their clients wish to be treated. Those two important expectations are seldom defined at the start of the engagement; instead, the parties gain that knowledge over time.

Staffing is another one. Clients are regularly surprised to discover that the partner who secured the business is no longer their day-to-day contact. This is usually explainable and often makes operational sense. It lands completely differently when it’s explained at the signing than when a client spends three weeks trying to figure out who keeps emailing them.

Clients interpret their responsibilities beyond payment — things like honest disclosure, timely document production, and consulting counsel before talking to the press — as shared ownership of the outcome when they’re framed that way. They read as fine print when they’re not.

Tone Does Half the Work

“Client agrees that any public statements regarding this matter shall require prior consultation with counsel” and “Because your public statements can affect your attorney-client privilege, we’ll ask that you reach out before speaking to the media so that we can protect your interests” are the same provision. One is written for the file. The other is written for the client.

Most engagement letters are written for the file.

The DC Bar’s guidance on engagement letters is consistent on this: shorter, clearer letters are more likely to be read and understood. A client who isn’t a lawyer will feel the difference between a document that welcomes them into a working relationship and one that manages their exposure to you, even if they couldn’t say exactly why.

Remember the language you spoke before you went to law school – Plain English? Use it.

The Relationship Argument

Research by BTI Consulting found that fewer than 15% of what attorneys believe about their own firm is actually shared by their clients. Stated more simply, most firms think they’re doing better than their clients think they’re doing.

Closing that gap isn’t primarily about doing better legal work. It’s about communication and building trust, and the engagement letter is the first communication and trust-builder that tells a client anything concrete about how you operate.

The TV station call, the staffing surprise, the client who doesn’t know who to reach when something happens — most of those situations have a solution that predates the problem by several weeks. It’s a document. It’s doing less work than it should.