Hurst, TX
Client Communication Texting for Hurst TX Attorneys
Almost every Hurst firm is texting clients. Almost none have written down what the rules are.
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It happened the way these things happen: an attorney gave a client their cell number during a difficult week, a paralegal started confirming appointments by message because it was faster, and within a year a meaningful share of client communication was running on a channel the firm never chose and does not control.
The remedy is a short written policy and a firm number to run it on. Business texting is available on the Cleod9 platform as part of its cloud communication service for Dallas-Fort Worth businesses. What follows is the policy, section by section. It is operational guidance rather than legal advice, and each firm's own advisor should settle its positions.
Section one: what the channel is for
Start here, because most of the difficulty in client texting comes from an undefined scope.
The uncontroversial uses are scheduling, appointment confirmations and reminders, logistics, document requests, and short procedural updates that report what happened without interpreting it.
The uses to exclude are legal advice in any form, anything requiring a decision from the client, adverse developments, fee negotiations, and anything that would need explanation to be understood correctly.
State the rule positively rather than as a list of prohibitions: a message reports, a call explains. That single sentence resolves most of the judgment calls staff will face, and it is easy to remember under pressure.
Then tell the clients. A line in the engagement letter saying what the firm uses messaging for, and what it does not, sets an expectation that prevents most of the awkward exchanges before they start.
Section two: which number
A firm number rather than a personal one, and the reasons are worth stating in the policy so the rule is understood rather than merely followed.
The thread belongs to the firm and is visible to whoever is covering, which matters most during a trial week when the attorney is unreachable. It is retained under arrangements the firm controls rather than on a device it does not. And when somebody leaves, the client relationship and the message history stay with the firm.
The attorney's private number stays private, which is the part that persuades people. A client who has the firm's number does not call a personal line at nine on a Sunday.
Say plainly that firm business does not happen on personal devices outside the firm's system, and give people a working alternative in the same breath, since a prohibition without an alternative is worked around within a month.
Section three: consent
Ask at engagement, in plain words, whether the client agrees to receive text messages from the firm, and record the answer, the number and the date.
Ask a second question at the same time, and this is the one most firms omit: whether messaging is a suitable channel for this client at all. In family, employment and similar matters some clients share a device or live with the person the matter concerns, and they will say so if asked.
Keep matter communication separate from anything promotional. Consent to one is not consent to the other.
A client may revoke consent by any reasonable method and it must be honored promptly. Not everyone writes stop, so the policy has to say that a person reads the queue rather than relying on a keyword filter, and that a revocation reaches the record rather than staying with whoever read it.
Section four: what a message may contain
The content rule follows from the fact that a message may be read by somebody other than the client.
Keep it to the firm name, the practical detail, and what the client should do. No description of the matter, no practice area, no case reference that implies one, and nothing that would be awkward if read by a household member.
Rule 1.05 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct treats information relating to representation as confidential, and that is the frame for deciding what a short message says rather than a general instinct about discretion.
Where the firm attaches or requests documents, decide how that works and where the documents land. MMS on the platform supports images and documents, which covers the common case of a client photographing a letter, and the policy needs to say who moves that into the matter file rather than leaving it in a thread.
Section five: the record
A client message is a communication about the matter and belongs in the matter file like any other.
Write the habit into the policy explicitly: anything in a client thread that a future reader of the file would need goes into the file, by the person who sent or received it, the same day.
Without that, the real history of a matter ends up split between the file and a thread, and the thread is the half that is hard to search, hard to hand over and easy to lose.
Ask Cleod9 where message content is stored, what the default retention period is, whether the firm can set its own, and whether specific content can be deleted on request. Put those answers in the policy alongside the firm's recording and file retention practices, since they raise the same questions and should be answered consistently.
Section six: who may send
Decide by role rather than leaving it open, and pair each role with what it may send.
Most firms allow legal assistants and paralegals to send scheduling, logistics and approved routine updates, and reserve anything else for an attorney. Written that way it is a workable rule rather than a hierarchy.
Give people the approved wordings rather than expecting them to compose. Three or four standard shapes, approved once by a partner, kept where anybody can copy them: the confirmation, the routine update, the document request, and the response to a client who asks something substantive.
Rules 5.01 and 5.03 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules address the responsibilities of supervising lawyers for lawyers and nonlawyer assistants, which is one practical argument for a shared firm channel over private threads: work conducted where a supervising lawyer can see it is easier to supervise.
Section seven: response times
Clients form an expectation from whatever happened the first few times, so the firm should set one deliberately.
State it in the engagement letter and in the policy: messages are read during business hours, replies within a stated period, and anything urgent is a phone call. Modest and kept beats generous and missed.
Then staff it. Name the destination and the owner by role rather than by individual, set at least two clearing times a day, and define what happens when that person is in a hearing all day. A firm that sends messages and does not read replies will lose both revocations and clients.
x-bees is included with Cleod9, and its AI transcription and summaries work across chat and voice, which keeps a queue readable. Cleod9 integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho; if the firm runs on a case management system, ask for that integration to be confirmed explicitly.
Section eight: departures and access
Short, and it prevents the problem that motivated the policy in the first place.
Access is set by role rather than by individual. When somebody leaves, removing platform access and reassigning their extension belongs on the same checklist as the email account and the building key, which is more reliable than remembering it separately.
Client threads stay with the firm and are reassigned to whoever now handles the matter, so the client's next message reaches somebody rather than a departed employee's device.
Where a departing person had client contact on a personal number, that is the moment to move those clients onto the firm's channel, and the policy should say who does it and when.
Moving the firm across
Existing informal threads cannot be ended abruptly, so plan for a gradual transition rather than a cutover.
Set a date after which new client communication happens on the firm channel. For existing clients, let the firm's number appear in outbound contact so it enters their phones naturally, and mention it in passing during calls rather than sending an announcement about the firm's internal arrangements.
Expect months rather than weeks, and expect a residual group who never move. The objective is that new relationships start on the firm's system and that the firm is not dependent on a personal device for the ones that matter.
Ask Cleod9 how number registration is handled, since business messaging over standard ten-digit numbers runs through carrier registration and unregistered traffic is more likely to be filtered.
Common questions
Can a client insist on texting the attorney directly?
They can ask, and the firm can accommodate it on the firm's channel rather than on a personal number, which gives the client the same responsiveness with none of the drawbacks.
What if a client sends something substantive?
Acknowledge and move it to a call, using the approved wording. Then file whatever was sent, since it is part of the matter regardless of how it arrived.
Do we need consent for every client?
Ask each one at engagement and record the answer. It takes ten seconds and it is the foundation of everything else in the policy.
How long should the policy be?
Two pages. A longer one will not be read, and the eight sections above cover what a firm actually has to decide.
The situations the policy exists for
A policy is easier to write and much easier to follow when it has been tested against the awkward cases rather than the routine ones. Five come up in most firms.
A client texts at eleven at night about something that worries them. Nothing about the hour makes it urgent, and answering establishes that the firm answers at eleven. The workable response is to reply the next morning within the stated response time, and the policy should say that plainly so nobody has to decide alone at eleven.
A client texts a question that has a short answer which is nonetheless advice. This is the most common hard case, because the short answer is right there and giving it feels like service. It is a call, and the message should say the attorney will ring rather than attempting a careful partial answer.
A client sends a document and asks whether it is a problem. The document goes in the file, the question goes to a call.
A client copies somebody else into a message thread, or forwards one. The policy should say what happens next, since the firm has lost control of the confidentiality assumption and the client may not have realized it.
Somebody who is not the client texts the firm's number about the matter. An opposing party, a family member, a witness. Staff need a rule for this rather than an instinct, and in most firms the rule is to acknowledge nothing about the matter and route it to an attorney.
Walk through those five with everyone who will send messages, once, for fifteen minutes. That conversation does more than the written document, and the document is what people return to afterward.
Reviewing whether the policy is being followed
An unread policy is a document rather than a practice, and messaging habits drift faster than most because each message is small.
Once a quarter, read a sample of client threads. Not to catch anybody, and it is worth saying so, but to see whether the boundary between reporting and explaining is holding, whether the approved wordings are being used, and whether anything substantive has been answered in a thread that should have been a call.
Check the same sample against the matter files. If material in the threads never made it into the files, the daily filing habit has not taken hold, and month three is a far better time to correct that than year two.
Look at response times as well. A firm that stated a standard and is quietly missing it has a problem that will surface as a complaint rather than as a metric, and the fix is usually that the queue lost its owner rather than that anyone stopped caring.
Then update the approved wordings with whatever the quarter taught. The most common change is a new standard response for a question clients keep asking, which is worth writing once rather than improvising twenty times.
Talking to Cleod9
Cleod9 is a Dallas-Fort Worth provider supporting its own customers, so a Hurst firm deals with someone in the same metro rather than a distant queue. The platform is described on the Cleod9 services page.
Draft the eight sections before the conversation, even roughly. A firm that knows what its own rules should be gets a configuration that matches them, rather than a configuration that quietly becomes the policy by default.