Example: from the criminal end of things—you were at the bar and tied on a few. Got in the car to head home and next thing you know, there’s a Kmart blue light special going on in your rearview. Only the officer who approaches the driver’s side isn’t offering you great deals on impact sockets, he or she is ready to breathalyze you into a holding cell. Now you’ve got a DUI. If we assume for the sake of the story that this was a relapse, it might be a time to get thyself to a meeting and ask your fellow anonymous alcoholics if they know of any attorneys who are good at handling these sorts of things.
This approach to getting a lead on a good lawyer is preferable to flipping a phone book open to the attorneys page, shutting your eyes, and dropping your finger on an ad. The yellow pages won’t make for a good Ouija board. Ask your family, ask your friends—they’re good for more than just last-minute rides to the airport.
Similarly, there are basic rules for selecting a civil attorney, even down to the group research level. Say a loved one tragically passed and it looks like hazardous working conditions contributed to their death—asbestos, toxic chemicals, that nasty stuff. In that instance, rather than playing Russian roulette with your local lawyer options, go sit down with a group of survivors. This isn’t an uncommon thing now. If you know the name of an attorney who interests you from seeing some brilliant ad campaign, look him up in old newspapers, do a little detective work online. Have they won similar cases? Did they get huge honking loads of dinero out of the evil fat cats they recently sued? Civil counsels’ legal records are public record, you just need to track them down.
It’s easy for firms to buy up ad time, but it’s important to pay attention to what they’ve done, not just what they say they’ll do.
I’m not 100 percent against using whatever means necessary to get to the right man or woman for your legal needs. If you like, you can check out bar-approved lawyer referral services, but those might not give you a complete picture of your future legal savior, either.
Remember, the attorney works for you. Fellow doctors of jurisprudence will probably be pissed at me for pointing this out, but it’s perfectly okay for a potential client to interview an attorney to see if the chemistry is right. I’m confident in my abilities to perform—you can speed-date as many lawyers as you like; I have a feeling I’m going to be the guy you’re going home with. After a few dates, go with your gut and make it official with the right suitor for your legal suit.
That is: we’ve gotten this far and you’ve found a counselor who hits your sweet spot. Maybe you like what you’ve seen attached to their name in the papers. Maybe you like the Maltese Falcon statue on their desk. Maybe you just like the strawberry candies they put out in their reception area. If they say they’re open to the thrilling adventure that is every new client, you’ve reached a crossing.
This is your opportunity to decide whether you want to hire this person. And all that stuff about what to look for won’t amount to a hill of beans if you sit down, stare that counselor in the eye, and think, “No way do I want this asshole to have my finances, my criminal record, or God forbid my life in his hands.” But if you like it (it being your future lawyer), put a proverbial ring on it. Pull the trigger, dive in. Ride off into the Just Lawyered sunset, or at least toward the long honeymoon of your case procedure.
Some of this might seem like common sense, yes. But a little tough love, if I may: sometimes people end up needing a lawyer because what they really needed in the first place was some common sense. Everyone has lapses in judgment from time to time—vision cloudy, idle hands becoming the devil’s plaything and what have you. Nothing to be ashamed of, but we’re going to measure twice and cut once to make sure you’re crystal clear about what you’re looking for in your would-be counsel.
Let’s get to it, then.
Say you get an appointment with an attorney. Casual coffee meet and greet, in-office confab, hang-gliding trip across one of the great southwestern deserts—whatever sweeps your sand. This first interaction is vital. Go in with this mercifully short checklist of things to look for.
I call what follows “The Other Big Cs.”
• Chemistry. We all know speed-dating works like this: you’ve got three-to-five minutes to decide if there’s some magic spark that will eventually lead to some binding and grinding between you and that equally nervous person nursing a mai tai on the other side of that tiny round table, right? You have to judge their teeth, their hair, eye contact, shoulder-width, pore-size—all in nothing flat.
Good news! You’ve got way more time than that when you first encounter prospective legal counsel. Personality in this case is paramount. It doesn’t matter how well-recommended that attorney is, doesn’t matter how much the cameras love them when they’re on the courthouse steps—if anything about that attorney makes you feel uneasy, sleazy—hell, even sleepy—they aren’t the counselor for you. This is an instance when gut instincts are your best friend, because the hard truth is if you and this vessel of legal wisdom just don’t harmonize, the entire case will go horribly out of tune. You two will be like Simon and Cher, Sonny and Garfunkel. It won’t work.
• Communication. To put it bluntly, we lawyers can suck at communicating with clients efficiently. I wish it wasn’t true, but it is. So this is what you do on your low-speed date with prospective Counselor X: clarify the best way to communicate and what sort of turnaround to expect. Like, if you e-mail X’s paralegal to see if you need to be there for the next court date, can you expect a reply sometime before the actual court date? You don’t want to be hanging out by the pool halfway through a second pitcher of margaritas only to get a panicked call asking why the hell you aren’t in court.
Where we lack in communication, we make up in performance. You’d be surprised at how often attorneys have performing-arts backgrounds—music, theater, musical theater, it varies. A truly charming and engaging counselor tethered to a hang glider could still drop the ball when it comes to simply clarifying whether you need to show up for a court date or not, but may dazzle every judge this side of Justice Street.
And hey, it’s understandable that lawyers occasionally have issues keeping clients informed. Say it’s a lone wolf practice, only a secretary and the attorney. Just to break even and pay off their loans, that lawyer has to take on as many cases as he or she can reasonably manage. Everyone’s idea of what the word “reasonably” means is a little different. So it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The problem with that is judges (who were often lawyers themselves and can be filled with self-loathing regarding their time in the trenches) have very little mercy on attorneys who forget shit or misspeak. Already you can see how easy it is for even a gifted attorney to become overwhelmed.
Putting your prospective attorney on the spot in the first meeting about methods and speed of communication will at least make it clear to counsel that you expect to stay informed in a timely manner. Any attorney comfortable with this setup is a good bet for you.
• Compliance. I’m not sure “compliance” is the best word for this point, but it makes the whole “Other Big Cs” scheme work out great, so screw it, I’m going with it. It does pretty much fit this important point: you’ve got to feel that the attorney you’re scoping out is flexible and open-minded enough to really work with you. They have to go with your wishes, within reason. That is, if your wishes are really stupid and self-defeating, it’s also an attorney’s obligation to tell you so and try to steer you in a better direction. Example: if a client walks in and says, “I wanna go to court in my unitard hot dog costume because I just got baptized at the Church of the Non-Apostolic Wiener God,” it’s an attorney’s job to say, “Eh, not so sure about that.”