Choosing a good lawyer, oddly enough, is not the easiest task. The market is overflowing with offers, law schools graduate tens of thousands of lawyers every year, but there are not so many true professionals. It is important to understand that you need to find a qualified lawyer (lawyers will not tear you to pieces, each begging to give your case to him, as some trustees mistakenly, watching soap operas), so you have to try. The legal problem that you have – it’s yours, and only you and solve it.
How to distinguish a good lawyer from a bad one
Start by looking at what people write about the chosen specialist or law firm on the Internet. A public person, who has a reputation, ratings and reviews will always arouse more trust (all other things being equal). Why? Because this reputation he will cherish. Now any information is incredibly accessible, including negative information. There are plenty of platforms where you can leave a review about a person or company that you have interacted with. Although even a good reputation is not always a guarantee of making the right choice, as the example of Michael Kyriakides showed. Nevertheless, the reputation is a good indicator.
A competent professional will try by all means not to let a negative review appear about him: it spoils his reputation, his relationship with other (current and future) clients, it will affect his future work and income. Now, on almost all sites, reviews are left by real people from under their account on social networks. The reality of reviews is very easy to check. Reviews generated by a computer under a blank account are most often visible to the naked eye. The time of bots and anonymous custom reviews is over.
Yes, of course, there are massive competitor attacks, fake reviews by procedural opponents, and other unscrupulous attempts to ruin a reputation. But in most cases, the reviews on the sites are real and reflect reality. If you work well, you get a lot of good reviews; if you work poorly, you get a lot of bad reviews. Moreover, there are services where not only the customer evaluates the performer, but also the performer can evaluate the customer, that is, both the performer and the customer can give mutual feedback about each other.
A system of mutual ratings disciplines, contributes to an increase in the quality of services, an increase in personal responsibility for one’s actions, not only on the part of the doer, but also on the part of the customer, which is also very important. There are very few professionals who want to work with a client who has a low rating and negative reviews, because everyone is saving time and nerves. Such ratings are worth trusting, because if a specialist, for example, has dozens (or better hundreds) of positive reviews – it says a lot. At a minimum, it shows that he knows how to interact with clients, does his job well and knows how to solve complex situations that can always arise in any field, especially when it comes to such an imprecise science as law, where the result depends on a huge number of unpredictable external factors.
You can also tell from the reviews whether the person will do their job to the end. One of the biggest client fears in our field is that a lawyer will take a case, start it, do something (or do nothing at all) and disappear. Unfortunately, many of my clients have encountered this situation after working with other lawyers. You can learn more about this situation from this source. This is, in fact, the worst outcome, which in addition to the fact that it can lead to irreparable consequences, it is also very demoralizing for the client.
