Conditional FindRecord

I'm kind of banging my head against this one. I've searched the forums and outside, and think I have the idea, but Access say it can't find the forms.

I added an "Notepad" for end user to make notes of each clients if they wanted to. It is a pop up form, has its own table, with ClientID FK to the primary table's PK of same name.

The code I tried is

DoCmd.OpenForm "Notepad", , , Forms![Notepad]![ClientID] = ClientID Or acNewRec

It wouldn't accept an If... Else statement which makes it problematic, because I only want one note per client, so need to make sure Access check whether there is already a record that corresponds to the client, pull that one up. If there isn't any, then create a new record.

The other code I used allowed me to run and can get the ClientID, but does not create a new record when there should be a new one for a new client. It was

DoCmd.DoMenuItem acFormBar, acRecordsMenu, acSaveRecord, , acMenuVer70
DoCmd.OpenForm "Notepad"

Let Forms![notepad]![ClientID] = ClientID

End Sub

If I add an Do.cmd.Gotorecord, , acNewRec, it returns a error message that there would be a duplicate record, which is expected.

So how do I get Access to simply

1) Check if there is a note already written for so and so client then pull it up
2) if there isn't any for that client, create a new record