In practice, I always preferred a face-to-face meeting with my clients to a telephone conversation or an exchange of correspondence.  I believed in-person conversations were much more effective and better for both client and lawyer — and still do.  However, it is important to keep in mind the true costs (to the lawyer and client) of that “short” meeting.  From 37signals:

If you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour and invite 10 people to attend then it’s a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You are trading 10 hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time. And it’s probably more like 15 hours since there are mental switching costs associated with stopping what you’re doing, going somewhere else to do something else, and then resuming what you were doing before.

Remember how valuable your clients’ time is.  Though you may not think their time is worth as much as yours, at the end of the meeting, neither of you will get that time back. 

technorati tags: meetings, productivity, client+service