What should I look for when seeking a lawyer? The standard legal disclaimer is that someone should ask a lawyer if they really need legal advice. So how do you find the right lawyer? How can you judge how "good" a lawyer is? How can you find what is a fair price? Are there other things you should check? For any lawyers here, how do your clients find you, and what kinds of things should encourage someone to hire you?
Let me turn this around, how would you find a doctor, plumber or hairdresser? There is nothing special about lawyers! Things you should consider when hiring a lawyer are the same as for any other profession or trade: The service you need them to perform Location Value Ability/Expertise References/Referrals As a simple procedure: Define your search. You don't need a big city lawyer for a traffic offence and you probably need a specialist if you are going to lodge a patent. Consider how far you want to travel for face-to-face meetings. Again, a traffic offence will have you looking in your local area; a patent may involve travel to a major city. As a general guide a bigger firm will have more expertise available but charge higher fees. Search Internet, telephone books, court records, radio ads, word of mouth etc. etc. Build a shortlist based on your criteria. Contact your prospectives and ask them: Can they do the work you need? What will it cost? Who are their references? Check the references! Really! Check the references! Decide.
D should be subpoenaing anything and everything they need from anyone and everyone, including E. No matter how good terms you are on, if you are involved in a lawsuit you should not be relying on anyone's good faith to supply you what you need. Suppose you ask nicely and they say yes but, for whatever reason, they don't supply them by your court date. Without a subpoena, if you ask for a continuance the judge will say "tough t*^%^$s"; with a subpoena they will say " Yes certainly, oh, and Mr Sheriff, here is a warrant for the documents, go and get them for me please. Oh and a warrant for the arrest of the person who ignored my subpoena." Where do you want to be?
Now I'm having another conversation with a lawyer and I'm not particularly happy (not to say outraged) that to answer a simple question they require £95 + VAT for 30 minutes Skype session. Maybe it is a common practice in law industry - in my industry (web development) we share our knowledge in an open-source manner. The rate you were charged is actually reasonable for such a limited engagement. Few lawyers are willing to even consider providing any advice on such a limited basis. Most would try to limit their clients to cases generating thousands of pounds in an in person visit. Lawyers are in the business of selling knowledge and time, not documents and results. An open-source approach would undermine their business model just as much as it would for the movie industry or the recording industry. While I appreciate professional legal advice (I know it is required) I have a belief that by obtaining some knowledge first I'll be in a position to ask better questions. This belief is not necessarily very well founded in this context. The reality of information about the law is that the raw data has limited usefulness. One of the main things that a legal education provides is an ability to "issue spot" so that you know what points need to be researched and where to look for them. Without the overall context that a legal education provides, knowing what issues you should be looking for is difficult or impossible, and this is particular true in Anglo-American common law systems, where the law is embedded in an opaque network of appellate cases rather than laid out more or less completely in a carefully organized statute. Also, you are almost completely unqualified to distinguish between a simple question and a hard one. Just as it is difficult for a non-expert to know what is difficult or impossible for a computer to do (e.g. turning raw image input in the models of reality is very hard for computers but easy for people, while intense calculations are simple for computers but hard for people), it is often very difficult for a non-lawyer to know what is an easy or hard legal question. For example, the rights of neighboring home owners when trees start to grow across property lines seem like simple questions but are actually extremely complex legally, as is another simple question such as explaining what a book means in IP terms as a book migrates to a new platform. But, some seemingly complex points (e.g. detailed questions of tax law or civil procedure) can have very simple and clear answers. Finally, keep in mind that in a situation like spousal alimony, if you've done as much research as you state, it is very likely that a definitive answer that you are looking for simply does not exist. There a lots of legal questions that do not have clear objective answers. This is because trial judges in family law matters have wide discretion in a lot of the fine points of alimony decisions, much of it exercised at the trial court level that does not generate binding legal precedents and is not widely available to researchers. Therefore, there is really no substitute in evaluating how judges will exercise that discretion for the collective experience of an attorney who has been through the process many, many times before the particular group of judges who are likely to handle your individual case. In sum, while I understand your frustration, a lot of it is rooted in common, but inaccurate assumptions about how the legal system works.
If you're in the United States, another lawyer in a firm you've hired may or may not be your attorney, but it would not be uncommon for him to have some involvement in the case, and he would be expected to treat you as a client in terms of privilege and conflicts of interest. Just the same, this is something you need to be very direct on. &quot;Are you my attorney?&quot; or &quot;Have we established an attorney-client relationship?&quot; are going to be your best options.
united-states You may be confusing the right to an attorney if you cannot afford one that is applicable only in CRIMINAL cases, not civil cases like you are discussing. You may be able to get an attorney to take your case on a contingency basis but there are two things to keep in mind: The attorney has to have some expectation that the case is winnable. The amount to be recovered must be worth the risk of taking on this case. In other words, for the attorney it's more of a business question that a legal one. Many attorneys will give you a free 30 minute, more or less, consultation. Perhaps you might give that a try.
Tell whatever lawyer is drafting the "official paperwork" about the problem and ask if it is covered or if you need to change the text or add a rider. If neither company competes, a mutual release/license of existing shared code should be perfectly manageable for an experienced attorney.
I think they called these lawyers &quot;outside counsel&quot;, does this mean they are not part of the same organization so (in theory) their advice and position is objective and neutral? Not really. The economics of the arrangement are different, but outside counsel is not more or less objective and neutral, in theory at least, than in house counsel. Outside counsel and in house counsel owe essentially the same duties in the context of a lawyer-client relationship to the client (in this case, the union), although, in practice, outside counsel with evaluate those duties and that relationship in the context of a single one off assignment, while in house counsel will evaluate those duties with a much richer understanding of the underlying facts of a matter and the larger context in which it is playing out. A lawyer's duty is to advance the objectives of the client, and those objective are largely within the province of the client and not the lawyer, although a lawyer has greater latitude in exercise discretion regarding the means by which this objective is achieved. For example, a client could legitimately say that it wants to bring a lawsuit arising out of an incident it was involved in, but the lawyer would usually decide which court it was filed in, what specific legal claims were asserted, and so on. [If] the lawyers didn't think they had a good chance to win, must the lawyers still work to accomplish this? There are a few boundary lines, short of resigning or withdrawing from representation when not legally or ethically required to do so, because the lawyer simply doesn't want to do it. First, the lawyer isn't allowed to bring groundless, frivolous, or vexatious litigation, or otherwise engage in unethical conduct (e.g. fraud), even if the client wants to do so. Second, if a lawyer with an organization as a client (like a union) believes that someone within the organization, possibly with some authority, is about to engage in illegal activity that will hurt the organization, the lawyer has a duty to speak up (internally) about this conduct and urge the client representative not to break the law, if necessary, going up as high in the management or governance of the company as necessary (e.g. up to the highest governing board or CEO) to blow the whistle on this conduct internally within the organization, and to resign if the lawyer can't otherwise avoid being involved in illegal conduct by representatives of the organization. Third, the lawyer must counsel the client representative in a manner sufficient to make the client's decision to pursue a court of action that is unlikely to win, but is not groundless, frivolous, vexatious, or illegal, an informed decision. But, if the client decides to go forward with a course of action or objective after making an informed decision to do so with information provided by the lawyer, the lawyer has to do his or her best to carry out the decision of the client even if it would not have been the decision that the lawyer would have made. The lawyer is still an agent of the client, carrying out the client's wishes, not an entirely independent free actor. A member had hired a lawyer with an opposing view to the union's lawyers. Would this other lawyer necessarily have to agree with this view or believe there is a chance at success (e.g. proving it's illegal discrimination to have a COVID policy in the workplace)? Again, no. Lawyers don't have to agree personally with the positions that they take on behalf of their clients, so long as those positions are not groundless, frivolous, or vexatious litigation, and the lawyer's work does not otherwise engage in unethical conduct (e.g. fraud), it isn't improper for the lawyer to do that. To provide some context for why these rules are the case, keep in mind that lawyers are in the business, primarily, of dealing with situations in which there are potential ambiguities or uncertainties in the law. Lawyers, judges, and courts recognize that the law and language are pliable and subject to interpretation and application to a set of facts and that it is very frequently (although not always) possible to make legitimate arguments for different interpretations of it. And, it is hard, in advance, to know which of multiple different interpretations will wind up being found to be correct (with many legal issues in a case often never having those ambiguities resolved in that case because some other factor ends up making the ambiguous issues irrelevant). Lawyers exist to make sure that every legitimate interpretation that benefits a represented party involved in an interaction to which the law applies is given fair consideration, with someone else generally making the final decision about what to do.
This appears to be a complaint about lawyers using the legal process to achieve what their client wants. Forgive me, but this seems to be like complaining that doctors only want to cure the client's disease, architects only want to design the client's buildings and generals only want to kill the client's enemies. Your lawyer is not your business strategist or your life coach! A civil case is always about the money. If you are pursuing a civil case over a principle then you are going to spend a lot of money and probably lose. The use of a lawyer should always be part of your wider negotiation strategy in the same way that your armed forces are part of your diplomacy; in both cases the threat of use is usually better than the actual use. A civil case always follows a failure to successfully negotiate. Not all by any means, but most, civil cases would be better settled by agreement than litigation by all parties. If you believe that your objectives can best be served by a social media campaign, political pressure, etc. then go for it. Your lawyer can advise you what the risks are wrt to defamation etc. but ultimately how you choose to pursue your goal is up to you. Lawyers, understandably, look for legal solutions. A public relations professional is far better placed than a lawyer to inform your media strategy.