The mother of potential client called me the other day; she had been looking for a lawyer on the web. She had called one of the “nationwide” criminal defense corporations (you know the ones — they have names like corporations instead of groups of human beings). She reported to me that they told her that for $15,000 they would give her son a 99% chance of beating his case. (I had already quoted her a reasonable and substantially lower fee, and told her the truth: that nobody could truthrully guarantee a result, but that I was familiar with the judge and I thought we might have a good chance on the facts as she described them if we approached the problem in this-and-such sort of way. A lawyer can never truthfully say, based only on a telephone conversation with the client’s mother, that there is only a 1% chance of the client losing.)
So that got me thinking: what kind of varmint tells the mother of a kid in trouble that for $15 grand he’ll give her kid a 99% chance of skating? 99% is a weasel number — it’s high enough that the potential client sees it as a guarantee, but low enough that, if things don’t go exactly the way the client wants, the lawyer can shake his head and say “I never guaranteed we would win.”
The answer, of course, is that only a lawyer who doesn’t care about his clients would make that kind of promise. Only a lawyer who doesn’t care about his clients is going to tell them what he thinks they want to hear. Any lawyer who cares is going to tell his clients the truth as he sees it from day one — before he is hired.
The irony is that a lot of people are more likely to hire the lawyer who tells them what they want to hear. So lots of people are more likely to hire the lawyer who doesn’t care about them. The bright side is that when they do, and when things don’t happen as 99% promised, they come to me and try to get me to fix things.
(Do you have lawyer advertising horror stories of your own? Drop me a comment and let me know.)
Technorati Tags: advertising, criminal defense, lawyers
Tags: Uncategorized
This entry was posted by Mark Bennett
on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
About The Author
Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.
Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :.Skype me. :.
This is absolutely true. Most attorneys in my area dont care about the case at all, they only care about the money they will make out of it. In fact, they decide how to proceed based upon the best way to give them more money and not necessarily what’s the right way to go for the case. I am so discouraged with lawyers and the way our “justice” system lets them get away with ripping people off for their own betterment. This especially sucks when the case involves children who could be harmed as a result of the lawyer not doing their job properly. I am in the midst of a case right now. I already let one of my attorneys go because he proved that he only cared about the $$. Then the second lawyer i hired seemed to have a real iunterest in the case…but proved himself just another money hungry bottomfeeder as time passed. Our “justice” system needs to be re-examined by the proper agencies/authorities. People are indeed evil.
[...] to promise that he will “probably” get the client out on bond or that there is a “99% chance” he will get the client’s case dismissed. These weaselly promises are less than [...]