For years my advice to people looking for a criminal-defense lawyer has been this: “find someone that you can trust, and then find a way to pay him or her.” Since I started saying that publicly, lots of other criminal-defense lawyers have put up websites suggesting that you should trust them for one reason or another.

You can’t decide to trust someone because he tells you to. In fact, experience often teaches us that the last person we should trust is the person who asks us to. You can’t trust someone based on his resume, either — trusting someone isn’t an intellectual decision, it’s an emotional decision. Trust comes from your gut.

You can’t decide which lawyer you are going to trust with your freedom without talking with as many of them as you can stand to — preferably while looking them in the eye.

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