Illinois family law attorney Thomas Miller offers his take on finding a lawyer best suited to handle your legal matter.
An initial consultation with an attorney is much like an interview, you being the interviewer and the attorney being the applicant. If you like the lawyer, you will hire them. Over ten years of "being interviewed," I have noticed some patterns in the interviewer's behavior. I do believe there is a right and wrong way to conduct this "interview".
Some people go into an initial consultation with one aim in mind: get as much information as possible. This is especially true if the lawyer charges an initial consultation fee (as I almost always do). While understandable, one should never lose sight of the purpose of the consultation: to find out what your options are and the cost of choosing each option (for instance, do you even need an attorney).
If you are just pumping the lawyer for information, you may not be paying attention to whether you are just getting information for the sake of being informed, or information for the sake of being sold on a particular route (perhaps one that involves a large retainer for the lawyer). For this reason, your questions should include some general process ones, like, what would you think is the best route.
If you are only looking for free consultations, you may be missing the right attorney. There are some matters that lend themselves better to free initial consultations. For instance, contingency cases (like personal injury) or immigration cases. It may take five to thirty minutes to figure out if there is a case or not. If there is a case, the lawyer gets paid if you get paid in the contingency case, or gets a flat fee in many immigration cases.
However, most cases are handled on a pay for the work basis. Business and
family law attorneys almost always bill you for the time they specifically spent working on your case. All a lawyer has is valuable time, which is the product of many years of study and experience.
If you are paying for the initial consultation you are paying for the lawyer's time. It makes sense that you can expect answers that do not always lead to you hiring the lawyer because the lawyer is not working for nothing to get something in the future. He already got paid, and if he makes more, well, that is just bonus.
In all initial consultations, be wary of a lawyer telling you how the case will end. No person knows what will happen in the future with certainty. The uncertainty increases with the number of individuals involved. If your case involves an adversary, and if the adversary has a lawyer, and if there is a Judge or Arbitrator involved, the only true answer is that no one knows what will happen.
A lawyer (in our free society) that knows how a Judge will rule does not exist. If a lawyer tell you they know, they are likely telling you what you want to hear. After that answer, the only thing left is for you plunk down a retainer check to hire them so they can go get you that certain result. You will soon see that something, often the unsavory opposing party or lawyer, thwarted the expected result (according to the lawyer you hired).
This does not mean that the lawyer cannot predict various results, and even assign some likelihoods to each result. In a realistic world the most likely results will not all be what you want. In general, do not walk away just because a lawyer tells you that what will likely happen is the opposite of what you think is fair. Most likely, that lawyer is being honest with you, and certainly not trying to "make a sale."
In general, that's the point to keep in mind when hoping to get results from a legal case. Fair is not the standard. Law is the standard. The legal expert, the lawyer, will listen to your facts and hopefully give you some idea of how the law will affect an outcome. Knowing this, you can explore other "what if" scenarios, like, what if we offer this to the other side, or what if we remain silent, etc.
In short, do not rule out paying for an initial consultation, ask open ended questions allowing the lawyer to show you where they would go, be wary of certain outcomes and overly rosy predictions, and do not confuse law with fairness.
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