I have clients who don’t know where I live. Not my home address—the city.
That reality became clear when I recently saw a client in person for the first time since before we started working together several years ago. Great client: pays his bills, no drama, easy to work with. Somewhere in the conversation it came out that he thought I knew our mutual friend from Houston. I don’t. I knew him from when all three of us lived in the Dallas area. He’d simply never had reason to think about it.
I’ve been practicing long enough to remember when it was different. Clients came to the office. They signed engagement letters in person, handed over a check for the retainer, and looked you in the eye before they trusted you with their problem. Physical proximity mattered because building trust required it.
That’s not the default anymore.
I don’t have a dedicated office. Engagement letters go out through DocuSign. Retainers are paid electronically. Most of my practice runs through email, text, and the occasional phone call. When I need to put a face to a voice, I schedule a video call, though plenty of matters don’t require even that. I have clients in my own city whom I’ve never met.
How trust gets built now
The shift isn’t just logistical. It changes what clients actually evaluate when they decide to hire you and stay with you.
In the old model, trust got built before the engagement started. The office, the handshake, the check written in person: those were all signals. They told the client something about your stability and seriousness before you’d done a single thing for them. Geography was part of the package.
In the current model, those signals are mostly gone. Trust gets built through the work itself: how quickly you respond, how clearly you explain what’s happening, how well you handle the unexpected. Clients can’t see your office, but they can see every email you send. And they notice whether you deliver what you promised.
A client who stays with you for years—who pays his bills, brings you real work, and causes no drama—is telling you something about the quality of the relationship. What he knows is that you understand his problem, you know what you’re doing, and you get the work done. The city you’re in never comes up.
Why appellate practice lends itself to location independence
Not every practice area navigates this geographical shift as cleanly. A criminal defense lawyer who needs to appear in county court every Tuesday works under different constraints. A real estate attorney whose clients want to walk through a deal at a conference table has reasons to stay planted. Location independence works better in some practices than others.
Appellate practice sits at the far end of that spectrum. The work is writing. The product is a brief. Courts in Texas and across the country accept electronic filings as the default, not the exception. Oral argument, when it happens at all, is scheduled well in advance. And in many cases, the panel decides the case on the briefs alone.
That means the client is evaluating one thing: the quality of the work. Does the lawyer understand the record? Is the argument well-framed? Does the brief make the best case this set of facts allows? Those questions have nothing to do with what city the lawyer is in. A strong brief filed from Dallas reads the same as one filed from Austin or anywhere else. And an appellate lawyer who has built a state-wide reputation and relationships across the Texas court system isn’t confined to a single metro area. The work travels. So does the lawyer.
The one exception is embedded appellate counsel work—when you’re involved before and during the trial itself, working on jury charge, preservation issues, and the record as it develops. That work has a physical dimension. But even then, the constraint is proximity to the courthouse, not to the client or trial counsel’s office. The collaboration can still be largely remote. Only the courthouse appearance cannot.
This post began as a discussion on LinkedIn.