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WHERE to
find a New York Criminal Defense Lawyer
Contents
Introduction
Like with any other type of
goods or services, it is advisable to learn something about lawyers and
review a number of different lawyers to get a feel for the market.
Most people would never buy a new car these days before doing some
research and shopping around among a number of different car dealers.
Learning about the market teaches you the questions to ask and gives you
a sense of the value of the service you are requesting. The same
applies to hiring a lawyer. Hiring a lawyer is in important
decision. You are entrusting your case to him or her. The
outcome of your case could dramatically affect the rest of your life.
There is no shame in
shopping around or interviewing more than one lawyer. Competent,
decent lawyers will have not the slightest difficulty with you telling
them point blank that you are interviewing a number of lawyers.
Lawyers who appear "insulted" or try to pressure you to abandon your
further search for lawyers are probably lawyers you want to avoid.
Beware of a "there isn't a
moment to lose" pitch. Rarely are things so pressing. Unless
the accused is sitting in the police station being interrogated, time is
not usually so critical, at least the time required to find a good
criminal lawyer.
But where do you find the
lawyers from which to choose? People generally use the following
sources for criminal lawyers: 1) Word of Mouth 2) Yellow Pages 3) Local
Bar Association Referral Panels 4) The World Wide Web. Good
competent lawyers can be found by any one of these (and other) means, but each must
be understood for their merits and their limits.
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Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is a popular,
time-tested means to find a criminal defense lawyer
The benefit of relying on
word of mouth is that presumably you have the opportunity to find out
about the way a lawyer conducted a previous case. If you are going
to be relying on word of mouth, then take advantage of this benefit.
Ask questions about the lawyer not necessarily outcome related.
You may not be in a position to evaluate the outcome of the case and the
person relaying the information to you may not even understand the
outcome of his prior case. Ask questions instead aimed at the course
of representation.
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Did the lawyer appear
himself or send associates in his place?
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Did the lawyer return
telephone calls?
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Were fees discussed and
finalized up front or a source of conflict throughout the
representation?
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Did the lawyer sit down and
explain what was happening in language that could be understood by a
non-lawyer?
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Did the lawyer appear in
court on time?
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Was there a fee agreement in
writing?
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Did the lawyer seem prepared
for court appearances or disorganized in court?
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Were all options and legal
terms clearly explained?
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If there were a trial, did
the lawyer appear prepared and capable with organized trial preparation?
The outcome of the prior
case is not necessarily that instructive. While it is great if the
outcome were extremely positive, it is not necessarily going to be the
same for you. Your case is different. Finding out about the
way the lawyer conducted himself during the course of his representation
of the person referring him is probably a good guide to how it will be
for you.
Word of mouth is limited, however, because it is only as reliable as the perception of the
person who is giving you his opinion. That person could be
reliable but misled about the quality of the representation he received.
For example, he may believe that his lawyer got him a great deal (if he
took a plea), when in reality his lawyer did not get him as good a deal
as he might have had he been willing to work harder.
Most people want to believe
that they were not ripped off or taken advantage of and so will speak
highly of a prior lawyer who did not affirmatively do something
obviously horrible. Just about everyone will tell you he got a
"great deal" on his car, for example, when the reality is that everyone
can't get a "great deal".
There is a tendency also to
believe that dramatic results are driven primarily by the lawyer as
opposed to the individual case itself. Success in a prior case
does not predict success in a future case.
Therefore word of mouth is a
great way to get names for your list of lawyers to interview. Take
advantage of the opportunity it gives you to find out about how the
lawyer handled a prior case, but take into account that the source of
your information may not have an entirely objective understanding of the
quality of the legal services he received.
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Local Bar
Association Referral Panels
Another option for finding
listings of lawyers who say they practice criminal defense is the local
bar association referral panel. Each county in New York has its
own local bar association referral panel that you can call and request a
referral for a criminal defense lawyer.
If you are arrested and the
Court decides that you do not qualify for a free lawyer, the judge will
tell you to hire a lawyer and you will be provided a piece of paper with
the local bar association telephone number to help you find a lawyer.
When you call the local bar
association for a criminal defense lawyer recommendation, the staff who
answer the telephones are not under any circumstances hand-picking or
providing personal recommendations for any lawyer or group of lawyers.
They are theoretically simply providing the caller the next name that appears on a
list of lawyers who have requested to receive calls from people needing
criminal defense lawyers. The local bar association staff will
never advise you with respect to their personal opinions about any
particular lawyer on the list. The lawyer whose name you receive
if you call is left completely to chance.
Many people assume that these
bar association referral panels are composed of lawyers who are somehow
specially approved of or recommended by the respective bar
associations.
This is not
generally the case.
In Queens County, for example, any
lawyer who has passed the bar exam and is admitted to practice in New
York is eligible to place himself on the list, as long as he is willing
to pay the fee to be on the list and is a member of the bar association
(another fee).
Being on the list for criminal
defense lawyers, then, simply means that the lawyer has requested to be
placed on that list. That is as deep as the "selection process"
usually goes.
This should not be taken to
mean that the qualifications of people who might be on these lists are
less than what is necessary. In fact, a great many extremely
talented, experienced, highly qualified criminal defense lawyers are on
these lists.
But do not assume that the
lawyer they refer you to has been somehow specially hand-picked for you
or that there is some extra special bar association seal of approval on
the lawyer.
All that you can say for
sure, before you interview this lawyer, is that he has indicated a
desire to receive calls about criminal defense cases and that he is
admitted to practice law in New York. He or she might have tried
100 cases or 1 case, or anything in between. The name you receive
in your particular case, however, will be entirely left to chance.
Someone looking at a list you will never see will select a name from it
for you.
Strangely, I have heard that
at least one local bar association refuses to give out more than one
name at a time, as if to suggest that talking to a number of different
lawyers is somehow inappropriate.
I would recommend requesting
multiple names. It will increase your chances of finding someone
who will be most compatible with you. Since they are blindly and
impartially simply providing names off a list, the difference between
providing one name, three names, or twenty names would seem minimal.
I don't know why they
wouldn't simply post the entire list of lawyers on the world wide web
for all the world to see. Presumably the referral services were
developed to help the consumer. Competition is something that is
usually thought to benefit the consumer. Ask for three names.
Ask them to fax you a copy of the list so that YOU can choose who you
want to call. Let them tell you that they "can't do it."
In any event, whether you
get one name or twenty names from your local bar association referral
panels, you can at least be sure that the lawyer wants to receive calls
about criminal defense cases. Make the lawyer or lawyers part of
your list of lawyers to interview. Many of the best and brightest
criminal defense lawyers in New York City can be found among the lawyers
on these lists. But don't imagine that any particular lawyer's
presence on a bar association list is an indication of any special
prominence or expertise.
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Advertising
The official position of the
legal profession is that you should never hire any lawyer based solely
on an advertisement.
Of course you shouldn't make
the decision to hire a lawyer solely because of an advertisement. You
shouldn't make the decision to buy dog food solely because of an
advertisement.
Lawyer advertisements can be
obnoxious. Legal advertisements can also be tasteful,
legitimate, and completely proper as a means for lawyers to notify the
world of their existence and willingness to accept certain types of
cases.
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Yellow
Pages
Open the yellow pages and you
are sure to find large ads from lawyers or law firms advertising their
criminal defense practices.
Realize that the decision to
take out a large yellow pages ad is a marketing decision. The
question is whether or not the ad will generate business enough to cover
the expense.
A large ad may not indicate a
large practice. For example, it is quite possible
that a giant ad claiming an enormous number of specialties may be in reality a single lawyer who has simply gambled the
money on such a large ad. You will find this to be true if, after
hiring this lawyer, you are referred to someone else (perhaps because
the lawyer from the ad is "too busy" or because your case presents some
"special difficulty"). You will be able to tell whether this new
person is really part of the advertised firm by simply looking at his
business card. Does his business card show any affiliation with
the advertised lawyer's firm? If it does not then you have
probably found a lawyer who simply uses the telephone book to attract cases to farm out
to other lawyers. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this,
since you of course will decide who represents you, but you are entitled
to be aware of exactly what is happening and why. You may not be
dealing with a firm larger than a single lawyer when you call the ad in
the telephone book.
I am often amazed when I
examine the yellow pages advertising for criminal lawyers. Based
on my knowledge of the lawyers and law firms who actually practice in
criminal courts in New York City, it is amazing what the yellow pages
reveal.
There seems to be an inverse
relationship between the size of the ads and the actual size of the firm
or practice. There are lawyers I know to be solo practitioners or
in relatively small practices who advertise in enormous ads for every
type of criminal case and every type of civil lawsuit case, including
some highly technical and specialized areas of the law. There are
large law firms with many lawyers and support staff that don't dare to
attempt such a wide range of cases and these solo practitioners are
claiming to do it all. Most likely these solo practitioners do not
in fact do any or most of the cases advertised, but simply refer them
out to other lawyers who actually DO specialize in the types of cases
involved. The advertiser's incentive to refer cases is that,
assuming he helps with the representation of the client in some way, he
may receive compensation from the lawyer to whom he refers cases.
Most criminal defense lawyers do
have some presence in the telephone books. Those who classify
themselves as criminal defense lawyers are more likely to in fact
practice criminal defense. Therefore, you are justified in adding
lawyers to your list of lawyers to interview from the telephone book.
Just keep in mind that large,
colorful, expensive ads are not necessarily the clue to anything other
than the willingness of the lawyer to gamble a large amount of money in
the hopes of becoming some sort of lawyer referral service.
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The World
Wide Web
Another resource becoming
more and more popular for locating a criminal lawyer is the world wide
web. The web offers a host of interesting possibilities for
creative, interesting legal web sites.
Individual
Lawyer and Law Firm Web Sites
The advantage of examining a
lawyer's web site is that it is actually possible that you might find
out some useful information about the lawyer and his specialty.
The web offers a variety of means for lawyers to be creative in
providing interesting relevant content to those in need of information.
You will find that lawyers have responded to this potential in a variety
of ways. Look around. Click on a number of different lawyer
sites and compare them.
The web site also allows you
to find out information without having to sit in a lawyer's office.
Searching the world wide
web...(live example)
When searching the web for a
criminal lawyer it is helpful to use a simple phrase that identifies the
county of the problem and something indicating the type of law you are
interested in. For example, if you were arrested in Queens County,
your search phrase might be "queens criminal lawyer" or "queens criminal
court". These kinds of searches would be likely to generate a few
different lawyers' web sites. Click on them and see if you read
anything that interests you.
This is a live link
to the Google search engine. The above button works. |
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Web-Based
Lawyer Referral Services
Another means of finding
lawyers on the web is to patronize one of the many web-based lawyer
referral services. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes
professing a variety of levels of scrutiny of their lawyers or exclusiveness.
Any time you enter any legal
related search phrase in a search engine you are likely to see one or
more of these services. These legal referral service sites come
and go but they operate the same way. They hope to make money by
charging lawyers to be on the list, and they think their expertise on
obtaining high rankings in search engines like Google will encourage
lawyers to want to participate.
Some of these referral sites
are actually legitimate businesses and some are simply sites designed by
web marketing firms to essentially be yet another site for the lawyer
they are marketing.
This is not to say that
there won't be qualified, hard working criminal defense lawyers on these
services. You may well find some great lawyers using these
services.
But you need to remind yourself that
despite the screening and background checks claimed by the services, the
bottom line usually amounts to being admitted to practice in the state
and being willing to pay the fee.
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Hybrid
Web-Based Marketing Schemes
One or two extremely
aggressive legal marketing organizations have developed a hybrid
approach to marketing legal services on the web. When searching the web you
are likely to see these highly aggressively marketed "firms" come up in
legal related search results. These hybrid marketing schemes
identify themselves as "Nationwide criminal defense law firms".
While in some peculiar
doubletalk, the idea that they are "nationwide criminal defense law
firms" might be legally defensible, the reality is that they are not what most people would imagine to be a "nationwide
criminal defense law firm."
Most people would imagine a
"nationwide criminal defense law firm" to be a legitimate, unified
business with identifiable offices, addresses, and employees who work
together on a daily basis. These marketing creations, however,
seem to be web-based legal referral services all dressed up in a
different package.
One particularly
aggressively marketed hybrid that bills itself in some of its
advertising as the nation's "largest criminal defense law firm" bends
over backwards to convince you that it is a legitimate law firm.
The key to discovering its true nature involves a little detective work,
but all the information is there on the web. If you click on their
link to see the "New York" lawyers in their "firm" you will find a list
of lawyers who independently don't seem to advertise their membership in
this firm. One of them is identified by Martindale Hubble (a
listing of lawyers in the United States) as living in Maryland and being
retired from the practice of law. Another of them aggressively
markets his own law practice on the web here in New York and never once
suggests that he is part of any "nationwide law firm". If a lawyer
were a partner of a legitimate "nationwide law firm" one would expect
that he would not be advertising himself as being his own law firm and
never mentioning his relationship with this enormous and powerful law
firm.
Finally, I recently
discovered a particular site claiming to be a lawyer referral service
that revealed (when one clicks on the list of participating New York
criminal lawyers) THE EXACT SAME list of lawyers presented in the same
way, word for word who were supposedly part of this "Nation's Largest
Criminal Defense Law Firm." So much for them being a legitimate
law firm. They are a lawyer referral service.
The reality is that criminal
defense is not the sort of specialty that lends itself to a "Nationwide
law firm."
Once again, the fact that a
lawyer is a part of a lawyer referral service for criminal defense cases
DOES tell you that he wants criminal defense cases. Therefore, he
is more likely to be an active practicing criminal defense lawyer (the
retired lawyer from Maryland from above notwithstanding). You do
want an active practicing criminal defense lawyer to defend you in a
criminal case.
In the case of a lawyer
participating in one of these hybrid marketing schemes, however, you
will have to decide for yourself, whether it matters to you that he is
hoping you will believe him to be a member of some huge nationwide law
firm of enormous clout and prestige when in fact he is simply a
participant in another lawyer referral service like any other.
Given that criminal defense
is not the sort of specialty that lends itself to large corporate firms,
let alone nationwide law firms, the reality is likely that
the member lawyers pay a fee to become members of the "law firm" but
that they really share no more common interests than the fellow members
of any bar referral panel. Research your prospective lawyer.
See if he names this "nationwide law firm" on his business cards,
stationary, web site, or in any other way seems connected to some larger
entity than himself.
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