"Nothing has moved" is still an update

Acknowledge the same day something lands, then send a short update on a fixed rhythm — including the weeks when the update is that nothing has changed.

The silence that costs you is almost never theirs. It is the three days after a client sends you a document and hears nothing back, because that is when they stop wondering how the matter is going and start wondering whether it arrived at all. By the time someone complains you have done nothing, they are not describing your output. They are describing the only thing they could see.

The Legal Ombudsman’s annual complaints data for 2025/26 — the year to 31 March 2026, checked 1 October 2026 — records poor communication as the most common complaint type, at 24%, ahead of delay or failure to progress at 22%. That is legal services rather than every sector, but the shape holds: clients raise being left in the dark more often than they raise the work taking too long.

So speed is not the fix, and nor is a longer update. Two cheap signals are.

The two signals

Receipt, the same day. One line: what arrived, what it is for, what happens next. It can be a template, it can be automatic, it does not need to be thoughtful. Its only job is to close the gap where the client is wondering whether the email vanished.

State, on a rhythm. Friday, fortnightly, whatever you will actually keep. The message that feels too empty to send — “still waiting on the lender, nothing needed from you this week” — is the one doing the work. A client who hears “nothing has moved” knows you are holding the file. A client who hears nothing until the good news lands spent three weeks assuming you had dropped it.

The mechanism matters far less than the rhythm. A standing Friday email with three bullets works. A shared spreadsheet with a last-updated column works, if someone updates it. A recurring five-minute call works, and suits clients who do not read email. Tools like Content Snare, ClientLoop or a shared Trello board put the state somewhere the client can open it themselves, which removes the remembering but not the discipline. Pick the dullest option you will still be doing in November.