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    How to Hire a Lawyer: The Client's Essential Guide to Finding the Right Advocate
    How to Hire a Lawyer: The Client's Essential Guide to Finding the Right Advocate
    How to Hire a Lawyer: The Client's Essential Guide to Finding the Right Advocate
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    How to Hire a Lawyer: The Client's Essential Guide to Finding the Right Advocate

    By Audrey Ehrhardt

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    About this ebook

    With over one million attorneys practicing law, how do you know how to find the right lawyer for you?

    This book is full of insights to help you answer that question. The information already out there can be overwhelming, but this resource can help you cut through the noise from lawyers, marketers, firms, and scammers. Get the information you and, most importantly, learn the answers to questions that you didn’t know to ask. This is an essential must-read for anyone who has thought about or needs to hire a lawyer, packed with essential information on hire to hire a lawyer!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateSep 5, 2017
    ISBN9781543908824
    How to Hire a Lawyer: The Client's Essential Guide to Finding the Right Advocate

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      Book preview

      How to Hire a Lawyer - Audrey Ehrhardt

      How to Hire a Lawyer

      By: Audrey Ehrhardt, Esquire, CBC

      Print ISBN: 978-1-54390-881-7

      eBook ISBN: 978-1-54390-882-4

      All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 — Why Do We Hire Lawyers

      Chapter 2 — An Overview of How the Law Works

      Chapter 3 — The Way Your Case Works

      Chapter 4 — What to Look for in Your First Office Meeting

      Chapter 5 — Understanding Legal Contracts

      Chapter 6 — Who is on the Law Practice Team

      Chapter 7 — How to Communicate with Your Lawyer

      Chapter 8 — Finding the Right Lawyer for You

      CONCLUSION

      Disclaimer and Use of This Book

      APPENDIX

      EXERCISE 1 — Why Are You Hiring a Lawyer?

      EXERCISE 2 — What Type of Lawyer Do You Need?

      EXERCISE 3 — Key Features to Look for in Attorney Advertising

      EXERCISE 4 — Potential Legal Contract Elements and Provisions

      EXERCISE 5 — Establishing Good Communication

      Glossary

      At last count, when writing this book, the American Bar Association’s Lawyer Demographics Survey for 2015 shared that there were 1,300,705 licensed lawyers in America.¹ Over seventy five percent of those lawyers are in private practice in communities just like yours. Although the number of law students entering law school has dropped over the past five years, there are still a number of new lawyers graduating, passing the bar and entering the legal field.²

      With over one million attorneys practicing law, how do you know how to find the right lawyer for you?

      Before answering that question, let’s address where we are as a society of consumers. Now, more than ever before, there’s a consumer emphasis on speed, flexibility, and cost control. We see it everywhere; in what we purchase, where we purchase and how we purchase. It is a driving market force we see again and again in nationwide news and publications explaining why online stores and services continue to thrive while local businesses and anchor stores struggle.³

      We are living in a time where we want services delivered yesterday and, in many instances, can demand it. Clothes, home products, groceries, even concierge services, are on the rise. Online stores can deliver to our homes at the touch, or asked question, of a smartphone. In America, most of us can get anything we want instantaneously delivered to our homes.

      How does this shift in the consumer mindset, behavior and acquisitions process impact the attorney marketplace? More importantly, how can it transform and redefine your relationship with your attorney? Let me share with you.

      I am an attorney but I no longer have a law practice. Instead, I work with attorneys nationwide on developing, enhancing and marketing their practices. My business allows me, and my team, to see firsthand the increasing gap in understanding between attorneys and clients.

      More and more as I work with lawyers I see the frustration on both sides. On the side of the client, this frustration is often driven by the lack of instantaneous response or good communication. Most attorneys do not communicate via text, something that many clients have become accustomed to in their personal, and business, transactions. Combine this lack of instant communication with the fact that the planning involved for most legal issues takes time, which may include years of litigation, adherence to specific court timelines or some other means to resolve, that may be difficult to understand. When this is more time than you, as the client, believe these issues should take, it can further complicate the communication gap and raise the frustration level. On the other side of the equation is the attorney who doesn’t understand why the client does not want to wait several days for a call back or simply trust that everything is being done in his or her best interest.

      I watch as this gap in how we now operate as a society results in frustration when it comes to hiring a lawyer. I have personally witnessed individuals I know, who need to hire a good, experienced lawyer for their case, choose not to because of the perceived complications.

      Instead, there is a rising trend in the do-it-yourself or the quick and easy approach to law. The importance of hiring a lawyer who will be able to see every legal angle of your case is forgotten in a desire to focus on speed and cost control. Combine this with the desire not to waste time talking to a lawyer face-to-face and instead operate completely in the virtual environment, and you may have a recipe for disaster. Many will choose to use seemingly legal good enough forms which in many cases, although not all, result in more complications and problems later when critical deadlines are missed or the legal planning needs to be completed or implemented thereby negating any advantage gained through speed or cost control in the short term.

      Can we blame our smartphone dependent society? The fact that we have shifted to a mindset of instantaneous results? Maybe. Can we also blame the fact that the law is complicated and we might not really know what we are getting into when we hire a lawyer? Maybe that as well. While it may surprise you to learn how drastically a smartphone user’s attention span has decreased, we can’t blame everything on where we are as consumers in society.⁴ We cannot ignore the emotional reaction most of us have to legal cases and the fact that without good communication many of us feel nervous, frustrated and uncertain moving forward with a lawyer.

      As lawyers, it is our job to help you. To advocate for you. Part of that is making sure you are comfortable in the process. When you think about the fact that an average legal case can take weeks if not months or years, to complete, there is a lot of complex information to understand and operate within. Chances are the legal work to be completed on your behalf is well outside what you do on a daily basis. These complex legal issues combined with our trending consumer patterns as a society and our emotions tied to the case overall, certainly don’t set the stage for a perfect relationship.

      Adding technology to the equation further complicates the interactions between lawyers and clients. I see, on a weekly basis, the gap grow between clients who want to do everything in the digital ecosystem and the lawyer who continues to send correspondence through the mail. Does this mean clients are wrong in their expectations? Does this mean the lawyer is wrong in the way he or she operates the law practice? Neither person is wrong. There has to be, instead, an understanding, a bridge, built between the lawyer who is excellent at his or her job, but not necessarily technologically savvy, and our rapidly evolving digital demands as consumers.

      The laws that govern our land and our daily interactions remain complicated and extremely nuanced. The attempts to commoditize the law or to make it easy to understand, or easy for the do-it-yourselfers, should be

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