Back when I was still willing to set foot in the United States, I booked a cruise from L.A. to Dubai.
But then war broke out in the Middle East, and the cruise line eliminated several ports from the itinerary, shortened my cruise by six days, and dropped me off in Cape Town.
For those of you who are as geographically challenged as I am, Dubai and Cape Town are not particularly close to each other. And yet, after dumping me on a different continent than the one that they contracted to take me to, I have only good things to say about how the cruise line handled the situation.
I did not question their judgment that the itinerary had to be changed, or how they decided to change it. Everything that they had done to date told me that they knew what they were doing and would take care of me.
They offered reasonable financial compensation and assigned friendly and competent staff to help passengers arrange flights home from Cape Town. I left feeling so good about the cruise company that I cruised with them again the next winter. It was almost as if the cruise company did not know that the terms and conditions of their contract would have allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, but was aware of the value of goodwill and the danger of bad public relations.
Some years before that, I was scheduled to fly from Florida to Toronto at 10 am on a Canadian carrier. So, of course, I arrived at the airport at 7 am. For reasons known only to the airline, the flight left at about 10 pm instead. Every few hours they led me to believe that I would be departing imminently, thus assuring that I could not leave the airport to enjoy the day. Apart from a food voucher for an amount that would, at best, get me a sandwich, they offered no compensation. They treated the passengers like inconvenient cattle.
There is no need to name the cruise line. Cruise companies are famous for their excellent service. And there is no need to name the airline. Airlines are infamous for their atrocious service.
Which brings us to lawyers. In my experience, those of us who spend every day of our professional careers putting our clients first, find out that when things go sideways, our clients stick with us. They give us the benefit of the doubt. They accept our explanation for what went wrong. They go along with our plan for how to fix things. They pay whatever we tell them is reasonable in the circumstances. And they hire us again the next time.
But, if you are the type of lawyer who shows as much concern for their clients as was shown to me at the airport in Florida, the same misadventure might result in an unpaid bill, a bad Google review, a lawsuit, a lost client, a complaint to the Law Society, or all of the above.
Don’t be the [insert the name of just about any Canadian airline, except possibly Porter] of lawyers.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.