Choosing an Attorney

If law school is so hard to get through... how come there are so many lawyers? - Calvin Trillin

Whenever the benefits or advisability of using an attorney are discussed, the advice is always to use a competent, knowledgeable, and experienced professional. This is code meaning that you should use an attorney that knows what he or she is doing. It wouldn't do much good otherwise, right? The trick, then, is to find a competent, knowledgeable, and experienced attorney to draft a will for you.

State attorney ethics rules and malpractice lawsuits generally hold an attorney legally responsible for knowing the law when representing a client. However, this doesn't mean that they are necessarily experienced at handling particular cases.

At the same time, attorneys are usually not allowed to state that they are experts on a particular type of law (e.g., estate tax law). They may be general practitioners or die-hard estate planning attorneys, which may or may not be evident from the way their practice is described in an ad.

So how do you find an attorney to meet your needs? You can easily find hundreds of them through the phone book, via an attorney referral service, appearing on the estate planning seminar circuit, or just running behind an ambulance. Other than the ambulance chasers that you should always ignore, you are taking a chance with any of them unless you have some inside information on them (like a recommendation from somebody you know).

No matter how you find one, though, you should always interview them to check their competency and your comfort level with them. As part of the process, you should ask the attorney the following basic questions:

• What is the focus of your law practice?
• How much of your law practice is devoted to estate planning?
• How long have you been handling wills and other estate planning matters for clients?
• Do you draft your own wills or do you use some type of pre-made wills?
• Have you ever been sued by a client, reported by a client to your state's attorney licensing board, or subjected to disciplinary action by your state attorney licensing board?

Of course, you are free to ask the attorney any other questions you see fit (like fees charged). The point is that if an attorney is unwilling or unable to answer the above questions to your satisfaction, you are better off looking elsewhere. When interviewing the attorney, also make sure that your questions are part of a free initial consultation or else you might end up being asked to pay a lot of money before even having any legal work done for you.

Warning Picking an attorney by the size of their phone book listing or through an attorney referral service doesn't mean anything other than the fact that the attorney shells out more money than his peers for advertising expenses. Don't make the mistake of assuming that there is a correlation between such advertising and an attorney's skills or competency. Even greater caution should be taken when prepaid legal services are involved. In such cases, you are basically trading away your choice as to who represents you in return for reduced legal costs. Just keep in mind that generic legal services are limited in nature and tend to create generic results that may not fit your particular situation.