What Attorney is “Right” for You?

If I were hiring a personal injury attorney, who would I hire?

Here are some of the personal/professional attributes I’d look for:

• Talent

• Experience

• Charm

• Efficiency

• Financial Stability

(An additional note about Financial Stability. You really want a contingent fee attorney who is in a financial position that they can ride out any case and give advice that’s best for you as opposed to best for them. You don’t want to be told that you should settle your case because the attorney needs to pay last months’ rent.)

The attorney I hired would need all of the qualities checked above. But that’s only Part One of the screening process.

Part Two of the screening process would have more to do with my case and the attorney’s inventory.


What exactly does that mean? Let me break it down.

The first step in Part Two is to unflinchingly evaluate my own case. Is liability strong or weak? Do I have good witnesses or do they leave something to the imagination? Are my damages modest, moderate or huge?

The second step in Part Two is to find out more about the attorney’s inventory of cases. Some people think the number of cases is the most important factor. I don’t think that’s true. Much more important—to the potential client—is the distribution of the attorney’s case along the value curve.

Let’s say this is what the attorney’s inventory looks like. She has a few modest cases. Most are moderate. And there are a few huge ones.

If I thought my case was worth $25,000 I probably would pick another attorney. That’s because I’d be at the low end of the curve and wouldn’t feel like a priority. I would also wonder whether the attorney was set up to efficiently handle cases like mine.

And if I thought my case was worth more than $5,000,000 I might also consider another attorney. I would definitely feel like a priority. But again—irrespective of how great the attorney is—I’d question whether she was really set up to handle cases like mine.

But if I had a case that I thought was worth between $500,000 and $1,000,000 I’d hire this attorney (assuming she checked all the other boxes) right away. That would put my case in the sweet spot in terms of being a priority and also having an infrastructure in place designed to handle cases of the same magnitude.

I think a lot of people see a newspaper article about Attorney _____________ getting $100,000,000 verdict in an asbestos case and think that they should hire him for their $300,000 car wreck. No doubt Attorney ______________ is a silver-tongued devil and has a large staff he needs to keep busy. But after getting a taste of that $100,000,000 verdict he isn’t going to be super-incentivized to work on a $300,000 case.

Make sure to hire a really good attorney (Step One) who has an inventory of cases that’s similar to yours and ensures it’s going to be a priority (Step Two).