Lawfonics

The need

That Tuesday morning, I was waiting outside a courtroom in Istanbul. My phone was on silent. When I checked it, Deniz had called three times. She was going through a divorce and had an appointment at my office the next day. ‘If I bring the wrong papers, I’ll need another day off work. What should I prepare?’ she had asked.

The document list was already in my meeting notes, but I could not reply until the hearing ended. When I called at lunchtime, she said, ‘I couldn’t reach you, so I wondered whether tomorrow’s meeting had been cancelled.’ For me it was a routine question; for her it meant arranging childcare and time off work.

The need

We were reviewing the final clauses of a company contract in my Ankara office when the phone rang twice. I stayed with the meeting. That evening I called back Ahmet, who ran a small workshop. ‘I’m renting new premises and wanted you to look at the lease before I sign. I have to be at the shop tomorrow morning,’ he explained.

He had not been calling for legal advice over the phone. He needed a meeting time and a list of documents to bring. ‘If we’d settled on a time, I could have planned my day,’ he said. A missed call at my desk had left someone else’s working day on hold.

The need

I had already left my Izmir office that evening. The next morning I found an overseas missed call and an English message from Sarah, a client following a property matter in Türkiye. ‘It was my lunch break—the only chance I had to call. Is there any news?’ she asked.

Her free time fell outside our office hours. There was no new update approved for sharing, and the office notes already said so. We exchanged several messages just to find a callback time. When we finally spoke, Sarah said, ‘I only wanted to know when I would hear from you.’ She needed reassurance that her enquiry had been heard, not a lengthy legal opinion.