Choosing the Right Attorney

Whether you have an employment discrimination, personal injury or wrongful death case, choosing the right attorney can make or break your case.  Thankfully today, there are adequate resources out there to make sure you choose the right attorney for you.  What follows are certain steps one should undertake to ensure they find the right attorney.

First, get an understanding that type of legal service you need.  Just like doctors, where they have sub specialties, lawyers do too.  Often people assume that because one is a lawyer, they know the law and can help. This is not true.   The legal field has become so specialized that lawyers tend to specialize more in one or more fields but usually not more than three fields.   Some lawyers, go to court, others do not. Some lawyers will always want to settle case, others will go to battle in court if settlement cannot be achieved. 

Second, once you identified the type of legal service you need, there are legal services out there that have basically done the work for you in categorizing attorneys by specialty, such as lawyer.com  Of course one cannot forget the common method of asking a friend for a referral.    There are also other service out there that have peer review studies that can give you an idea how good a lawyer is in his or her field, like superlawyers. 

Third, once you have identified a list of attorneys, check the State Bar to investigate their record to get a full understanding of their character, discipline record and so forth.

Fourth, talk to the prospective lawyer. It is important that the lawyer demonstrates passion and strong interest in your case.  A lawyer/client relationship is a special bond where very personal things will be known by the attorney.  As such, you mush feel comfortable with that attorney and have the confidence that he or she will not just be treating you like a number but a special human being that was terribly wronged.