How do you check a lawyer’s reputation? It’s not as difficult as it may seem at first glance.
So here’s what you need to do to find a good lawyer.
How To Find A Good Lawyer
A 2019 study revealed that 32% of Americans used referrals from friends and family to find a good lawyer. Another 17% used lawyer websites, with 17% relying on online search engines. A further 16% and 9% used referrals from their lawyer friends and non-legal professionals, respectively.
These avenues will provide several possibilities that you will need to narrow down before settling on one lawyer. To do this, you should create a list of all your potential lawyers, schedule first consultations, and interview them.
Questions to ask your lawyer during the interview should include those that touch on fees, malpractice claims, areas of expertise, experience with similar cases, location, and availability.
This leaves you with a shorter list of lawyers to seriously consider, and their reputation is a primary consideration, one that can make or break their selection.
How to Check a Lawyer’s Reputation
Word of Mouth
Believe it or not, but checking a lawyer’s reputation can be as simple as hearing it from word of mouth.
Statistics show that 90% of people trust recommendations from family and friends, and so their experience with your lawyer of choice is important information. Can they vouch for the lawyer? What did they like or dislike when working with the lawyer, and can you compromise?
State Bar Database
Lawyers are legally required to become members of the bar association in states they wish to practice in. Most lawyers choose to practice in one state, however.
The state bar database collates lawyer details including their status history, malpractice claims, and area of the law they’re prohibited from practicing. Enter the lawyer’s name in the bar association’s website search function, and if they don’t show up, they are not licensed to practice.
Incidents of Legal Malpractice Claims
An average lawyer should expect at least three malpractice claims in their professional life. So a malpractice claim isn’t necessarily grounds for dismissing a potential lawyer. Find out the nature and number of legal malpractice claims a lawyer has had, and how frequent they’ve been.
The severity of the claims and the frequency are indicators of how reputable a lawyer is. For example, you’d rather work with a lawyer who’s had one issue of mishandling escrow accounts but corrected their mistake than one who’s constantly accused of conflict of interest.
Lawyer-Reputation Websites
Lawyer-reputation websites are amazing resources for checking lawyer reputations because their databases are built using real customer reviews. User reviews, both good and bad, are collected from all over the country and fed into the database. Users need to type only a lawyer’s name in the search box and every related review will pop up.
Since these databases give only one side of the story, the clients’ side, read the comments holistically, analyzing the rate of positive and negative reviews.
Check a Lawyer’s Reputation To Get Good Value and Results
A lawyer’s reputation says a lot about what the client-lawyer relationship will be like moving forward.
Lawyers are expensive, so you need to work with one with a great reputation.
Use resources such as your friends and family, reputation websites, and the state bar database. Also, check if the lawyer has corrected the mistakes they’ve been accused of.