Selecting Your Attorney

Selecting your attorney is fundamentally a very personal decision. It is critical to learn as much as possible about a prospective attorney or law firm: educational distinction, experience with complex cases, national reputation, ranking by other attorneys, accomplishments and track record. Excellence in each of those areas is a prerequisite when selecting your attorney.  Given the intensity of any lawsuit and the time required of lawyer and client alike, the personal perspective is also important: You should like and feel comfortable with this person.

When selecting an attorney to represent you in a dispute or lawsuit, it is equally significant to remain aware of the actual skills and specialization that you should be evaluating. Whether for complex commercial cases, white collar criminal defense, or personal injuries, a prospective client faced with the likelihood that the dispute could result in a civil or criminal filing should focus on finding a skilled trial lawyer. The case may involve a specific topical area — Ponzi fraud, patents, or trademarks — but the skills and specialization that will be paramount and determinative will be the depth of that lawyer’s trial skills rather than the prior topical knowledge. Specific subject areas of each case are different. The capacity to assimilate new topical knowledge is one of the defining characteristics of a skilled trial lawyer.

Each case presents different topics and details, and it is important that all are mastered during the course of the case. It is critical, for the ultimate success of the case, that you begin with an attorney who has the skills and specialization of a trial lawyer:

• The capacity to effectively absorb information and documents and to determine their use for the strategic benefit of the case.
• Comfort with combat and confrontation; and not shirking from either.
• The ability to effectively examine witnesses in depositions and in the courtroom.
• Committment to the client’s case, and undertaking the representation aggressively and uncompromisingly. The basic hard work of a case — the willingness to spend time with it — is perhaps the most important and least appreciated feature of successful trial lawyering. It is, and needs to be, very hard work.
• Effectivenes and persuasiveness, one-on-one, in writing, in a courtroom with a judge, and in a courtroom with a jury.
• Possessing rich, strategic skills that are demonstrated by a history of success and accomplishment.

Our firm — with its full team of resources — is nationally recognized for both its success and its accomplishments as a trial lawyer firm.