The Friday Afternoon Settlement Call

What Maria may not do

• She cannot answer the question. Choosing between settlement and trial is a legal judgment reserved to the client and the lawyer. A paralegal who gives that opinion is engaged in the unauthorized practice of law and is also displacing the attorney's professional judgment; Model Rule 5.3 makes Ms. Okafor responsible for Maria's work.
• She also cannot soften it into a halfway answer such as 'I personally would think about it.'

What she can do

1. Confirm the concrete facts already in the file: the $40,000 figure, the Monday noon expiration, any earlier written evaluation Ms. Okafor gave the client, and the amounts of medical specials.
2. Say plainly: 'I'm not able to advise you on the value of the offer; Ms. Okafor has to make that recommendation with you. I will get this to her tonight.'
3. Escalate in writing - email and text Ms. Okafor with the deadline in the subject line, so the record shows she was told before Monday.
4. Get authorization before asking defense counsel for an extension. A one-line request for a short extension is low risk, but it touches the client's rights, so it is the attorney's call.
5. Write a contemporaneous memo: the time of the call, exactly what the client said, exactly what Maria said, and what she did to reach the attorney.

Why this matters - If the offer lapses, the client may later claim he was misled. The documentation is the firm's protection.

Framing - Mr. Reyes's own public posts are not privileged, are routinely discoverable, and are the most common source of impeachment in injury cases.

What Maria must not do

• She must not tell him to delete the posts or 'clean up' his account. The case is pending, so the duty to preserve has already attached; counseling destruction can amount to spoliation and, in some states, obstruction (Rule 3.4(a); Rule 8.4(d)).
• She should not send a friend request or use a pseudonym to view a private account. Deception to obtain evidence violates Rule 8.4(c) and Rule 4.1, and it contaminates the evidence.

What she should do

1. Tell him factually: 'Please do not delete or change anything you have posted about the crash or the case until you speak with Ms. Okafor.' Telling a client to preserve is safe; telling him to remove is not.
2. Capture what is publicly visible now - screenshots with the URL and date, or a preservation tool - so the firm knows what exists.
3. Report it to Ms. Okafor with the captured material. A post showing him lifting weights, or describing the accident inconsistently, can destroy the claim, and the attorney needs it before advising on the $40,000 offer.

Next step - The attorney, not Maria, decides whether the client must be formally instructed and whether a written litigation hold goes out.

The problem - The photos existed, were in the client's control, and were destroyed after litigation was pending. That is spoliation. Maria must resist the instinct to 'fix' it.

Immediate steps

1. Report to Ms. Okafor today, in writing. The attorney must decide whether to disclose the deletion, whether to seek replacement evidence, and how to handle sanctions exposure. Hiding it compounds the original problem.
2. Do not try to recover the deleted files and then stay silent about their content, and do not draft a discovery response that omits them. A response certifying completeness when known evidence was destroyed is a false statement.
3. Preserve what remains: send a written preservation instruction covering his phone, cloud backup, and messaging apps. Separately ask the insurer and the body shop for their photographs and inspection reports, which may independently prove the damage.
4. Document the timeline - when he deleted, what he said about why, and what Maria told him.

Reasoning to pass along - Courts may give an adverse-inference instruction, exclude related testimony, or in egregious cases impose issue or default sanctions. Early, voluntary disclosure is often the difference between a bad outcome and a catastrophic one. The strategic decision is the attorney's; Maria's job is to make sure the attorney knows before the deadline, not after.