Finding an attorney who does your kind of problem all day

Law is specialized in a way that is not obvious from the outside. An attorney who is excellent at real estate closings may be genuinely unsuited to an employment dispute, and will often say so if asked directly. The difficulty is that a person with a problem does not know what specialty their problem belongs to, which is where most searches go wrong at the first step.

Five steps, in order, and the whole process takes about a week.

Step one: name the area of law, not the problem

Write your problem in one sentence, then work out what field it sits in. A dispute with a contractor is construction law, and often also consumer protection. A problem with a boundary is real property. Being fired is employment. A parent's care arrangement is elder law. Money owed to your business is commercial collections.

If you cannot tell, call your county bar association's referral service and describe it. Working out which specialty a problem belongs to is exactly what those services do, and the call is free.

Getting this right matters because it determines every search you run afterward. Searching for a general attorney produces general results; searching for the specialty produces people who do this every week.

Step two: build a list from sources that mean something

Four sources, in descending order of usefulness.

Your state or county bar referral service, which screens for practice area and often for years of experience in it.

Referrals from professionals who work near the problem. A real estate agent knows which attorneys handle title disputes. An accountant knows who handles business formation and disputes. A contractor knows who handles lien claims. These referrals are good because the referrer has seen the outcomes.

Referrals from people who had the same problem, which are useful but need a check: ask what the outcome was and what it cost, not just whether they liked the person.

Directories and search results, which are advertising. Useful for building a list, worthless as a filter.

Step three: check the licensing record before you call

Every state bar maintains a public record of attorneys admitted to practice there. It confirms that the person is licensed, that their license is active, and it usually shows any public discipline history.

Check it for every name on your list. It takes two minutes each and it is the only step in this process that can rule someone out on a fact rather than an impression. Confirm also that they are licensed in the state where your matter is, which is not always the state where their office is.

Step four: screen by phone before booking anything

Most offices will do a short call before a paid consultation. Four questions get you most of the way.

How much of your practice is this kind of matter? You want a proportion, and you want it to be substantial. Someone who says a quarter to a third is being honest and is probably fine. Someone who says they handle everything is telling you something useful.

Have you handled matters like this in this county? Local procedure and local familiarity matter more than people expect, particularly in courts with their own habits.

What is your fee structure for this type of work, and what does an initial consultation cost? Ask now rather than at the end of one.

Who would actually be working on it? In a firm of any size the person you speak to may not be the person who does the work, and that is fine as long as you know it.

When you may not need one at all

Part of vetting is deciding whether the problem justifies the engagement. Several categories genuinely do not.

A dispute within your state's small claims limit is usually best handled yourself, because attorneys are often not permitted in those courts and the fee would exceed the claim. A complaint against a licensed trade may be handled faster by the state licensing board, which can act on a license in a way no private attorney can. A problem with a bank, a card issuer or a lender frequently moves faster through a regulator's complaint process than through counsel. And many contract questions are answered by reading the contract carefully with a pot of coffee.

The reverse is also worth stating. Anything with a deadline attached, anything involving a signature you have been asked to give quickly, anything where the amount exceeds what you could absorb, and anything touching employment, housing discrimination or a lien on your property is worth at least one paid hour before you act. That hour is cheap relative to what it protects, and an attorney will tell you if there is nothing to do.

Step five: use the first meeting as a two way assessment

You are evaluating them while they evaluate the matter. Three things are worth watching for.

Whether they ask questions before offering conclusions. An attorney who has understood your situation asks about facts you had not mentioned. One who delivers a confident opinion in the first four minutes has pattern matched rather than listened.

Whether they tell you anything you did not want to hear. The most valuable answer in many first meetings is that a claim is weak or that pursuing it costs more than it recovers. Someone willing to say that is someone you can rely on later.

Whether you understand the explanation. An attorney who cannot explain your own matter to you in plain language will not be able to explain it to a judge or a jury either, and you will spend the whole engagement uncertain about what is happening.

Two consultations are worth the money on any matter of size. The second one costs less in preparation because your documents and chronology are already built, and hearing two independent assessments of the same facts tells you a great deal about which one to trust.