When you have legal troubles, it can be difficult to figure out where to start. Sometimes you can get away with asking your family or friends for help but that quickly becomes unhelpful when your case involves interpreting laws and court rulings. The most common place to start is with an attorney, but that just begs a new question…who do you hire?
All attorneys have at least some knowledge in most areas of law. After all, every single attorney must pass the bar exam to practice, which covers a wide range of information from fields such as contracts, criminal law, and real property to name a few. This does not mean, however, that every attorney is equipped to properly advise clients in every area of law. It is imperative that you take the extra step of hiring an attorney who works in the area where you need assistance.
Just like doctors, attorneys often specialize in one, two or even three distinct areas of law. The reason behind this is rather simple: by focusing on just a few areas of law, the attorney can become a a specialist in these fields and build intimate knowledge that a more generalist attorney simply cannot provide. Another added benefit of specialization is that an attorney will often see a vast number of the same types of cases, allowing them to better assist clients in the future with familiar issues.
As stated, there’s nothing preventing a prospective client from consulting and hiring an attorney who doesn’t specialize in the particular area the client’s case falls. Nonetheless, the client will likely have to pay a higher fee; the reason is because the attorney is effectively being hired for two purposes rather than just one: (1) learning or relearning the ins and outs of the field of law relevant to the client’s case, and (2) applying what they’ve learned to the facts of your case. Depending on the field, the learning process can be as simple as reading the state statutes to as complex as researching and analyzing 10 critical court cases. All of that takes time, which will be paid for by the client, when an hourly fee is agreed upon. A specialized attorney, on the other hand, already has such in-depth knowledge and will therefore only charge the client for applying that knowledge.
Going back to doctors as an example, an equivalent scenario would be to ask a pediatrician to conduct knee surgery. It’s not impossible for them to learn how to do it and eventually have the level of confidence necessary to satisfy the patient. That would, however, take time and money since surgery is not something a pediatrician performs. In contrast, an orthopedic surgeon would already have the knowledge and expertise to complete the task immediately and with a much higher degree of quality.
Here is a straightforward example. Attorney Allen is close friends with John and his family. In fact, he has been the attorney for the family business for 20 years. He is like a member of the family. One day, John Jr. gets pulled over and is charged with DUI when driving home from a college party. John Jr.’s parents quickly hired Attorney Allen because he is the onlyattorney that they know and trust. After reviewing the video and the breath test results, Attorney Allen convinces John to forego trial and plea to a DUI in order to avoid jail time. Allen missed that the police articulated no reasonable suspicion to pull over John in the first place. If Attorney Allen had filed a Motion to Suppress the stop, the video and the breath test would have been to be found fruit of the poisonous tree and thus inadmissible. This would have forced the State to dismiss the case since the lion’s share of their evidence would have been tossed. Since Attorney Allen normally practices business transactional law, he was not well-versed on the Fourth Amendment and the Rules of Criminal Procedure, and John now has a criminal record.
Do not be overcome with your personal relationship with your attorney. It is easy and very human to slip into a false sense of security by thinking “I’m friends with this attorney, so he/she can’t possibly steer me wrong.” The fact is, though, that the success of your case reliesheavily on the attorney’s professional expertise and not how well you know them. While your comfort level with a particular attorney should certainly be a consideration, it shouldn’t be your only one.
If you do require an attorney’s services, it’s important to make sure that they are honest about their skills and capabilities for your particular field of law. If you need a criminal law or personal injury attorney, call Hendry & Parker, P.A, in Dunedin, at (727) 205-5555 today for a free consultation.