Think of it this way. You are competing against other potential clients for a lawyer’s time, and odds are that the lawyer is much more willing to spend time conversing with your competitors who use the telephone rather than you who uses email. The reasons for the lawyer’s telephone preference, and the problem of the lawyer advertising email availability but not responding, are not relevant to your problem. What is relevant is that the lawyer will only spend a limited amount of time communicating with potential clients, so you need to be more competitive in your appoach by getting referred and using the phone.
Your best option is to have your lawyer contact a Canadian lawyer with whom he or she has some personal or professional connection. If you do not have a lawyer, or if your lawyer does not have Canadian contacts, then your next best bet is to call a Canadian lawyer who specializes in citizenship/immigration and state right up front: “I wish to retain a lawyer for a citizenship matter. What is your retainer and what is your hourly rate? Would you kindly return my call so that we can discuss the matter?” Those are the magic words, provided that they are made over the phone.
As far as the reasons for lawyers prefering initial telephone contact, I can can only speak for myself.
Most of my clients are referred to me by other lawyers or by other clients. I take these referrals seriously, for the odds are that they are not tire kickers. A lot of people call a lawyer without either the intention or the funds to hire the lawyer, so if the lawyer knows that the caller is not a tire kicker, that caller goes to the front of the line.
A few folks call after coming across me in the Yellow Pages or on the internet. I can get a lot of information out of them, and get a good feel for them (the sniff test), by speaking with them over the telephone.
Occasionally, someone will intitiate contact by email. If the email originated from a local ISP, I’ll usually reply, but if it is from out of the country, I’ll probably put it on the back burner, for it takes time to sort out the occasional legit emails fromthe scams that I receive daily. Once the many scammers are filtered out, there still remains the problem of folks who initiate contact via email more often than not wanting to have a conversation by email, which takes far more of my time than a telephone conversation. Since I earn by the minute, I don’t want to waste my time typing away in email chains, so my responses are usually quite short, and I try to set up an appointment for a brief telelephone conversation.