Why are you calling an Attorney’s office?
I’m guessing if you’re calling an attorney’s office, you need solutions to your legal problems and I’m guessing you don’t want to wait forever to get them (again, most of the good attorneys in town are often booked out a few weeks). Our staff is trained to answer your questions on the first call. Our staff is trained and has been provided a lot of resources (such as Frequently Asked Questions, FAQs drafted by an attorney) to help you on your very first call. This call and the resources they can/will send you is 100% free to you. I strongly believe you have the right to know your legal rights, and we have a lot of legal information (we’re creating more every week) that we want to give to you free of charge.
The only thing our non-attorney staff can’t do is give you legal advice: “In a nutshell, legal advice has the following characteristics: (1) Requires legal knowledge, skill, education and judgment; (2) Applies specific law to a particular set of circumstances; (3) Affects someone’s legal rights or responsibilities; and (4) Creates rights and responsibilities in the advice-giver. Unlike legal information – such as information posted on a street sign – legal advice proposes a specific course of action a client should take. For instance, it’s the difference between telling someone what to do (legal advice) as opposed to how to do it (legal information).” If you need legal advice, we’ll happily set you up for a paid consult with one of our attorneys.
What should you expect during your consultation?
Long story short, legal advice. If you’re paying for a consultation, you should get value out of that consultation, and not just a sales pitch. Obviously, we hope that if you need an attorney, you’ll hire us, but that is not the purpose of a consultation. If you’re paying for our time, then our #1 goal is to provide you as much value as possible. Typically during a consultation, we’ll spend the first 10-30 minutes answering any questions you might have (feel free to call our office and talk to our staff about some frequently asked questions if you’re having a hard time coming up with ones on your own). Generally we’ll then spend the next 10-20 minutes going over your case from a general, broad sense, so that you can get the big picture and hopefully help you identify those areas you didn’t know that you didn’t know. The last 10 minutes or so are generally spent going over your options on how to get the best solution to your problem (as we’ve mentioned before, rarely is trial your best solution, and we’ll use this time to explore what options are available to you).
