Lawyers are different. None of us are the same. I was listening to a continuing legal education CD in my car recently and the advice the lawyer was giving was that if a lawyer has a “difficult” client that doesn’t want to listen, sometimes the best thing to do is to bring another lawyer in to talk to your client with a different personality style. And that got me to thinking.
I thought a lot about how I am with my clients during our initial consultation. I really had not thought much about the decision that goes into selecting a family law attorney until I recently learned about someone who went for an initial consultation with three different lawyers (technically four because one consultation involved two lawyers at the same firm) and, not surprisingly, said there was a big difference between them. She, most unfortunately for her husband, selected the one with the highest hourly rate, believing that her husband would ultimately be saddled with all of the attorney’s fees anyway.
The problem of course is that while it is true that in a marriage where just the husband is working, the husband will have to make some type of fee contribution, if there are community assets available to pay for fees, the wife will still be contributing her community property towards her lawyer’s fees. And the lawyer with the higher hourly rate is not necessarily the “better lawyer”. Better can connote different things for different people. It may mean more aggressive, more ruthless, more knowledgeable, more compassionate… My point being that “better” is a very subjective term.
You are going through an extremely difficult time period in your life and you are going to be spending time with your lawyer. Personality goes a long way. You should feel comfortable with your lawyer. I would hope that the vast majority of my clients feel that way about me.
For all of your family law and business litigation needs, contact The Marcus Law Firm at 661-257-8877.