Five questions to ask before you hire a lawyer

The person in the consultation is not always the person who handles the file. That can be fine — teams work — but you should know the names, roles, and rates of everyone involved, and who your day-to-day contact is.

“Recently” is the load-bearing word. Law changes, courts change, and a practice that concentrated on your kind of matter years ago may not anymore. Listen for specifics: kinds of cases, the local courts involved, how they tended to resolve.

Structure, rates or percentage, billing increments, likely costs, and who advances them — the fee structures are simpler than they sound. The answer you want ends with a written agreement you can take home and read.

Most complaints about lawyers are not about losing — they’re about silence. Ask for the firm’s actual standard: who answers, through what channel, within what time.

No honest attorney guarantees a result. What an awesome one gives you instead is a range: the strong path, the weak path, what each costs, and what facts would move your case between them.