Houston attorney Mark Bennett, on his blog Defending People, has an excellent post up about “How To Choose A Criminal Defense Attorney” that drops most of the self-promoting junk that usually accompanies an attorney’s take on the matter, and actually helps answer the question.

This is a subject that comes up around our office and our marketing discussions pretty often, because we know how we want clients to pick an attorney, and we know how we fear they do it.

Want: “Will this person do the best job possible for my case?” “Does this person really know the law?” “Does this person care about me?”

Fear: “The other guy was cheaper.” “You’re never guaranteed to get off, so why trust anyone?” “Someone else said they had a 99% chance of getting a dismissal.”

The “fear” responses are scary because they’re never going to get anyone to come through our door, which is a bummer since we like to be busy, and because we have a lot of attorneys who are either parents or about to be, and all of their kids insist on eating every single day. They’re also scary because they’re usually the direct path to a bad lawyer.

There are a lot of bad lawyers in Austin – oftentimes, but not always, you can identify them by their caseload. Anyone with a high-volume practice is probably too busy to do a terrific job for you, or to give you a ton of personal attention. (Your case does require personal attention – even if it’s just a DWI, and during the consultation, the lawyer promised that he’d get you a dismissal if the cop did any of a zillion made-up things incorrectly.) It’s just math – hours in the day divided by clients equals you not being very important, and that typically translates to a plea, rather than a dismissal. We don’t like bad lawyers because they hurt our reputation, too, leading people to think that everyone who does what we do is sleazy, and because they get results that aren’t good enough for the good people we’ve set up shop to help.

So when a client insists that they just want the cheapest lawyer possible, it makes me, personally – Dan, the guy who works in the office – kind of sad, because it means that they don’t really know how to do this, or realize that it’s actually very important. When I hear that you’re never guaranteed a result, so it’s all a big crapshoot in the end – which is something I heard fairly often when we were conducting some market research – it makes it all sound kind of weird and metaphysical, like the odds of anything happening are 50/50, either it happens or it doesn’t. Either you get a good result from your lawyer, or you don’t, so who cares who the lawyer is? (Seriously – people actually say stuff like this when they’re being paid $50 to be honest.)

And the 99% chance of dismissal thing – oh, lord. Austin defense attorney Jamie Spencer had a blog entry about that recently that summed it up pretty well.

So what we want is for clients, before they walk in the door, to have some understanding of how to value our services. We do things a little bit differently here, with an in-house social work staff (and now a psychologist a couple days a week) which we find make a big difference. (It also helps save the client a little bit of money, because a social worker can do things that other firms just use attorneys for, and they’re both more efficient at it and way cheaper, in terms of hourly rates.) We also run a relatively low-volume practice (for a firm with so many attorneys), and we think that these things tend to make us pretty good at what we do. But it’s hard, if you’ve never hired an attorney before, to know what to value and how to value it.

That’s where Bennett’s blog provides such a useful service. Following his advice won’t necessarily lead everyone to us, which is okay, but it should at least prepare people to know what a good lawyer is, as opposed to a bad one.

Labels: hiring a lawyer

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