The $80,000 client looks exactly
like the $4,000 client.
Same assets, same facts, and one file costs twenty times the other. The difference is the person, and right now you find out who you have somewhere around month three. The Client Read tells you at intake, for less than one billable hour.
A reflection tool for counsel. Not a diagnosis. Not for use as evidence.
You size up every client across the first weeks of the file. Whether they will settle, whether they will hide things, whether they will take your advice. That read costs you the most expensive way there is: by finding out live, on your file, on your time.
And by the time the concerns are obvious, the engagement letter is already signed.
Six answers before the pressure hits
Your client takes a twenty-minute assessment on their phone. You get a one-page read, a talking map, and answers to the questions that decide what this file will cost you.
Will they settle, or fight past all reason?
The $4,000-versus-$80,000 fork. The read tells you whether you have a principled negotiator or a client who will burn the retainer for vindication, before you price the file.
Will they be straight on disclosure?
The secretive client costs you discovery fights, imputed income, and your own credibility. The read flags the disclosure-risk pattern at intake, while there is still time to manage it.
Will they melt down, or quietly take the wheel?
You are trained to watch for the client who erupts. The expensive one goes quiet, looks composed, and starts running their own case. The read catches the one you cannot see coming.
Will they read as cooperative to a judge?
A good parent with an unmanaged control pattern presents as unwilling to co-parent, and the cooperation factor punishes it. The read names the gap while you can still coach it.
Will they take your advice?
The client who arrives with their own theory of the case second-guesses every move and takes the pen back under pressure. The read tells you how to keep it.
What language works, including about your bill?
How to frame advice so this particular client acts on it, and how to have the fee conversation so you get paid without burning the relationship.
What knowing is worth
The firm pays, billed annually, or $279 month to month. Your client never sees a line item, and there is no retainer amendment or approval to chase. Want to see it on one file first? A single read is $350. Founding firms lock $149 per lawyer per month for three years.
Click through a live file
A fictional client, a real product. The map talks you through how he is wired, how he fails under pressure, what he does in mediation, with disclosure, in front of a judge, and what he will cost.
▶ Open the live demoThe other party is never assessed. Every read is built from your own client and their own account.
Held to the line that matters
Not a diagnosis
Behaviour and tendencies under pressure, in plain language. Not a psychological assessment, and never a parenting or custody opinion.
Your work product
Prepared for you, as counsel, to manage your own client. Built to be held as work product, never filed, never handed to the other side.
Canadian and private
Client data handled under PIPEDA and Alberta's PIPA in a secure, access-controlled system. For your eyes and your file.
Where the read comes from
You are going to ask what backs this up. Good. Here is the honest answer.
Published psychology, not invented labels
The motivation read is built on Self-Determination Theory. The pressure read draws on Gottman's conflict research and Lynch's work on overcontrol. The derailer layer comes from the leadership-derailer tradition, and the scoring engine carries signals mapped to the Big Five, the most replicated model in personality science. Every construct is one you can look up tonight.
Written by a practitioner, proven on real files
Designed by a practicing executive coach for his own paying practice, prototyped on his own life first, then refined across real engagements, whole teams assessed and the reads in daily use, before it ever touched family law. The family-law version was shaped with a practicing family lawyer, answering the questions a working file actually asks.
Honest about its category, on purpose
This is a behavioural pattern read for counsel, the same non-diagnostic category as the high-conflict framework much of the family bar already trains in. It is deliberately not a forensic instrument. That is what keeps it your work product, out of the evidence pile, and safe to use. A formal validation program is planned, built on founding-cohort files, and until it is done we will never use the word validated. You verify every read against your own judgment. That is the design.
Get it before your opposing counsel does
We are opening The Client Read to a small founding group of family lawyers. Founding firms lock $149 per lawyer per month for three years against the $249 list rate, run unlimited reads on their own files from day one, and shape what the product becomes. When the founding group is full, it is full.