How to have a good working relationship with your legal nurse consultant.

Can nurturing great relationships with your colleagues and partners lead to increased profits and better outcomes for clients? Absolutely! In fact, an article by Harvard Business Review found that positive work cultures are more productive which leads to amplified creativity.

This shouldn’t be different for legal nurse consultants (LNCs) and personal injury attorneys. Not only is the relationship between an LNC and a personal injury attorney delicate, we are also privy to some of the most heart-wrenching cases that call for justice and work under strenuous circumstances.

In this article, I will explain what you, the personal injury attorney needs to know in order to have a good working relationship with your legal nurse consultants to increase satisfaction and improve having your chances of more client wins.

1) Hire someone you truly enjoy talking with.

This should be a no-brainer but it needs to be said. If you want to work with someone who makes you eager to approach your work every day, the first thing is to make sure you enjoy talking with them. Very simple!

It is for this reason that I highly advocate meeting with your LNCs before you commit to working with them. If a face-to-face meeting is impossible, be sure that you are comfortable with their personality, mannerism, values, and professional approach to work. 

The relationship between an LNC and an attorney should be a perfect match. It’s not enough to check off certifications, awards, and a roster of winning clients. You truly need to enjoy talking with them in order to present a united force for your clients.

2) Trust that your LNC wants the best for you and your client.

Trust is crucial to the survival of any relationship, whether it is business or personal.

Lack of trust in any relationship is easy to spot. This comes across as setting unrealistic expectations, always ‘nickel and diming’ everything people say and do, micromanaging their activities, and prematurely predicting failure.

Remember that you are a team and you need to work together. This means trusting in their competence and giving them a chance to deliver results to you and your clients. 

By the way, a good LNC can tell the difference between high anxiety while working on a high-stakes case or a blatant disregard for their opinions and experience.

2) Trust that your LNC wants to make your life simpler, not more complex.

You may be making your life and workflows harder than it ought to (and you don’t even know it). Here’s what I mean. 

You don’t need a novel or an album to convince you of your LNC’s expertise. As someone who has done lots of defense medical exams (DMEs)/independent medical exams (IMEs), I know how much information you need to come to an informed decision on behalf of your client. My job is to make sure that everything that could tip the case in favor of your client is well documented.

It is not about volume. If you don't need a 30-page report, you won't get it. What you need is relevance, and that is my technique. I work by capturing what is most important and what attorneys (YOU) need. Similarly, I’m not afraid to state this when working with attorneys for the first time.

3) Communicate well and respond to correspondences.

It is not enough to state that you have exceptional communication skills. You need to actually demonstrate these skills.

With that said, here’s where to start: respond to emails. Some people don’t respond to emails and this not only makes you look unprofessional; you're also not serving your client. Your clients trust that you are looking out for them in every sense of the word. Ignoring calls or emails from your partners isn’t exactly a good example of being an advocate.

I understand that sometimes, these delays arise from hesitation, and in bigger firms, the need to get buy-in from other stakeholders. However, LNCs are busy. They are not going to sit around for a week waiting for you to make up your mind. 

Be comfortable with making decisions on your feet or you lose the case.

4) Be constructive in your feedback.

Now that you know the importance of communication, there is an even greater need to know how to give feedback. 

Interestingly, constructive feedback has been proven to increase loyalty in the workplace. According to a research by Leadership IQ that wanted to assess trust in the workplace, “having a boss who listens constructively to a worker’s on-the-job problems was found to be the strongest predictor of loyalty to an organization, accounting for fully 26% of their wanting to stay or go.”

This is great intel for both you and I. While our working relationship isn’t always in a boss vs employee setting, we know that constructive feedback leads to openness in communication, which can improve the quality of one’s work. If you want something done in a specific manner, your best course of action is to speak up tactfully and be direct.

Conclusion

Working with a legal nurse consultant can help you win cases. But you need to know how to maintain a working, professional relationship with one in order to fully represent your clients.

Silvia Aninye is a legal nurse consultant and CEO of Weber Legal Nurse Consulting LLC. She provides Defense Medical Exams (DMEs) observations for attorneys and helps them find testifying experts for different specialties to support their individual cases. For more information about her services and how to work with her, visit her website to reach out to her via DM.