As always, before reading my post, please review my disclaimer by clicking on the link above or by clicking on this link. As always, any legal principles discussed apply only to the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I know it has been some time since my last blog post, and as noted last October, you can expect my posts to be irregular and infrequent now, although I do strive to at least try to keep past blog posts up to date, and they are not going anywhere. Today's blog post will be a little different than my standard format, in that instead of going into a broad principle, I am going to tell a story, and then bring about the point of it. Nonetheless, I think this is something you should read if you are considering hiring an attorney for your legal needs. Please note that some specific facts about the story I'm about to tell have been altered so as to shield the identities of those involved.
I have strived, I'm sure not always with success, throughout my career to provide an honest voice when a potential client comes to me about a case. I try not to sugar-coat things, I try not to make promises I don't know for sure that I can keep, and I try to make sure the potential client has an honest and realistic assessment of his or her case. I run through best case scenarios, sure, but I also run through worst case scenarios, and discuss what I consider to be the likelihood of each outcome. I'm painfully well aware that this approach to potential clients has cost me clients over the years - after all, I am routinely telling potential clients something other than what they want to hear. My favorite example of this is when potential clients come to me wanting to file an appeal to the Court of Appeals. The first thing I will tell them, before I even hear a word of the details of their case, is "remember that by my estimate, 85% of appeals fail, so the odds are yours will too." Nonetheless, I do believe I would rather have fewer clients, but ones who know what to expect, than more clients ready to be disappointed when I cannot deliver what they want.
The value of this approach came to the fore today, and what I saw bothered me so much that I felt compelled to write about it. Normally this is something I might opine about for my friends on Facebook, but as I thought about it, I realized it more naturally belonged here, so here it is.
I had a consultation with a young woman whose husband had abandoned her a year or two earlier. She desperately wanted to move on with her life, and came to me about getting a divorce. I discussed the process with her, what I expected would happen, and the fact that her particular case had some procedural challenges. She told me she thought my price was right, and that she wanted to hire me as I had come highly recommended to her by someone she trusts. However, she asked if I could promise her that her divorce would be complete within a month. Two months at most. For various reasons, she felt she absolutely needed her divorce to be done within two months.
I told her that I could not make that promise. That procedural anomalies with her case meant that it would require a minimum of three and a half months to complete, but that four or five months was more likely. I told her I'd move as fast as I could, but I simply could not promise anything faster than five months, and even that assumed no bumps coming up along the way. She thanked me, left my office and I never heard from her again.
Today, while I was at a routine filing trip to the courthouse, I happened upon her case file. Turns out her divorce was finalized this week. Her consultation with me was in June of 2015. This struck me so much - that she had come to me desperate for a promise to be divorced within two months, yet here she was finally getting her divorce more than two years later - that I just had to investigate. And what I found wasn't pretty.
Her divorce was finalized by her fourth attorney. Her first three had all begun the process for her, then attempted to take various shortcuts around the procedural issues I had discussed with her at our consultation. It was clear from reading the files that they had been trying to meet her timeline, and in the process, all three attempts failed to complete the divorce and greatly delayed the entire process. Finally, the fourth attorney did exactly what I would have done, and sure enough, from beginning to end, it took him just over four months to complete the process.
I would note, the fourth attorney's actions did not surprise me. This is an attorney I know well, and who is on my short list of family law attorneys in Northern Virginia that I myself will refer people to if, for whatever reason, my firm cannot represent them. This should tell you how highly I think of this particular attorney (after all, referring potential clients is probably the highest praise one attorney can give another within our profession). So, in that attorney's case, I was not surprised that attorney had done it the right way. But sadly, I also wasn't all that surprised to see that three other attorneys were willing to make promises they could not keep just to get the client.
In the end, this woman spent over two years waiting to get a divorce she could have gotten in 4-5 months, and probably spent about 3-4 times the legal fees in the process. And while her request, demand really, was unreasonable, as someone who is not an attorney, she had no way to really know that. Add in to this that she has other attorneys willing to make these outlandish promises, and it's no real surprise that it took her so long to realize that what I was saying was right. As attorneys, it should be our responsibility to make sure clients understand the process well enough to know what can or cannot be done.
So, the cautionary tale in all of this is simple. If you have an attorney telling you nothing but things you want to hear, you should be ready to push back with questions. If different attorneys are telling you different things, don't be afraid to tell them, directly, what was said by the other attorney. Listen to their response. If this woman had reached back out to me, told me what her attorney was planning to do in order to meet her timeline, and asked for my thoughts, I could have explained to her in under 5 minutes why it wasn't going to work. I never got that chance.
So, if you are looking for an attorney, please be careful. If you're speaking to an attorney ready to promise that everything you want will be yours, perhaps it is time to speak to someone else.
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