I would prefer you just call my office if you want to consult, but you can send an email if you prefer, or if we don’t call you back quickly

I can’t perform legal consultations by email, or evaluate cases by email, or give legal advice by email or answer legal questions by email. The format of email just does not allow for you and I to communicate in enough detail. Please just call my office if you would like to talk about your potential case.

Please Take Note: (1) e-mail communication is not a secure method of communication, (2) any e-mail that is sent to you or by you may be copied and held by various computers it passes through as it goes from you to me or vice versa, (3) persons not participating in our communications may intercept our communications by improperly accessing your computer or my computer or even some computer unconnected to either of us which the e-mail passed through.

Some problems with potential new clients
using email to try to tell their stories to Phil:

Email is anonymous, not detailed enough, employers can read your email, it gets lost or deleted, you can’t easily include copies of documents.

People very rarely put their name, address and phone number in their email “signatures” or in the body of the message. So I usually have no way of knowing with whom I am corresponding, and I never get enough info in an email. This is troublesome.

People mess up their cases by sending emails to lawyers from their work stations or company laptops. People don’t realize that the company computer system keeps copies of all outgoing and incoming emails forever. People also don’t realize that it’s generally legal in Missouri for the company to read any email sent or received through its computer system. But whether it is legal or not, employers WILL search the computer system for any emails regarding you, once you sue them, and they will try to use those emails as evidence against you in court.

Another concern with email is that emails get lost or deleted easily. I may accidentally delete your email with the daily spam. Or maybe the sender accidentally used a certain key word in the subject line, causing my Email program’s “rules” feature to automatically sort the email into the wrong folder (a folder that I don’t read very often, or that I automatically delete, of course.)

I may never get your email for a variety of other reasons. For example, maybe my ISP’s email server space has filled up. When that happens, each and every new email is rejected by my email server until I make some space available. I may not recognize that I have this problem until someone calls me to ask whether I got their email.

Also, maybe my anti-virus program will alert me that your email (or an attachment to it) seems to contain some trouble, such as a virus, and so I will have to delete your email unread.

I do not allow my email program to send “read receipts” so there is no way for you to know if I’ve seen your email. If your email did not “bounce” back to you as undeliverable, that’s a good indication that my email server received your email, but that doesn’t mean that I, myself, personally, ever saw your email or read it.

It’s very difficult to send supporting documentation with an email message unless the documentation is already in digital format, and most of the time, most of the documentation is not in digital format. So your email message will not be very informative, ultimately, in most cases.

And there are other little miscellaneous problems with relying on email as a means of communicating in the early stages of your case. I would prefer that you just call me.

Thanks for your cooperation.