How to orient yourself in choosing your trusted lawyer: the importance of the web, the first consultation, the lawyer’s preparation and understanding the client’s needs.
Avocat Suceava, Gologan Florin – When there is a problem to solve, it’s time to choose a good lawyer. “An incompetent lawyer can delay a trial for months or years. A good one can delay it forever” wrote Ernest Younger. And to find the right solution, we need someone who knows how to gain our trust and advise us on the best path to follow. But how do you recognize a good lawyer?
This is evidently a very important choice, because it will begin a collaboration that will allow us to satisfy our needs in the most effective way and in the shortest possible time.
Let’s see, then, how to recognize a good lawyer from a few decisive clues:
- How to orient yourself when choosing a lawyer
- Empathy towards the customer
- The strategies adopted to deal with a problem
- Management of the customer and their commitments
- Legal and technological preparation
How to orient yourself when choosing a lawyer
The most usual way to select your trusted lawyer is to rely on the advice of friends, relatives and acquaintances who have had previous experience, or to choose a lawyer who enjoys a certain reputation, even simply by word of mouth. Nowadays, however, there is also the possibility of knowing the lawyers in our area through the web. Many professionals, in fact, choose to promote their business through advertisements on the Internet or even by creating actual websites for their law firm. In this way, it is easier for the client to find a lawyer who practices in his city and consult, through the various sections of his website, what matters his firm deals with and what his specializations are.
Empathy towards the customer
Obviously, the first meeting in a lawyer’s office will allow us to get to know him directly and to understand, perhaps even at first glance, whether he is the right collaborator for our needs. In this sense, the ability of understanding demonstrated by the professional towards the client and the situation he is experiencing will be very important. The lawyer’s empathy , his ability to identify with the client and to propose one or more possible solutions, are all factors that can make the collaboration profitable and which demonstrate his ability to “immerse himself in the reality” of the client to best evaluate every aspect of the problem.
The strategies adopted to deal with a problem
The first consultation with a lawyer (usually free or subject to a pre-determined fee) is an opportunity to get an idea of his way of operating. Here, in fact, the client can easily get an idea of the professional’s ability to reason, his analytical, logical deduction and reasoning skills. Broadly speaking, it can be said that a good lawyer is able to correctly frame the situation, paying attention to details but without getting lost in the details and using his legal knowledge together with a good dose of practical sense. All of this should easily lead to the planning of an effective action plan.
Management of the customer and their commitments
Equally important is the lawyer’s management of his own business. In this sense, the degree of availability demonstrated to the customer can be an excellent indicator. If our lawyer spends a few minutes of office hours with us, or continually postpones our appointment, it means that he is probably not able to organize and optimize his commitments and prefers to favor quantity over quality: but the client does not want to be just a number. Obviously, this is only a general indication, which must be verified “live”: if the conversation with the lawyer only lasts a few minutes, it may well be that his experience and intuition are enough to come up with the right solution!
Legal and technological preparation
Last, but certainly not least, the preparation of the lawyer. And we are not just referring to knowledge of laws and regulations, but also to confidence and familiarity with recurring concepts in everyday life, from the financial to the tax sector. And let’s not forget his IT skills: it is no longer time to be snobbish towards technological gadgets, because the electronic process is now an integral part of the legal profession, and even communications with clients, colleagues, companies and public bodies take place often and willingly electronically.
