This is immigration attorney Parviz Malakouti and in this video, we're gonna go over five quick tips for how to choose a lawyer!
This applies for any type of law. It's not just focused on immigration law.
A lot of times people come to me after they've had a bad experience with another lawyer,
and sometimes of course you just hear stories basically of people having terrible experiences with lawyers or
finding out after the fact something about their lawyer that they wish they had known beforehand.
So here's five quick tips.
First thing you want to do when you're thinking about hiring a lawyer is you want to look up that person on their state bar
website. You need to find out if they are a real lawyer.
There's a lot of fake lawyers running around - the notaries, paralegals that are pretending to be lawyers,
especially in the fields of bankruptcy, immigration, tax preparation.
You want to make sure that you look them up. Make sure that they are a lawyer. Here in California, everybody
who's a lawyer has to be listed on the California State Bar website and that is the way it is in most, if not all
states. So that's tip
number one. Tip number two:
when you look up the person on the State Bar website, you want to find out if they've ever been
sanctioned for any type of misconduct.
In California when a lawyer is sanctioned, that is public record and it shows right up in their California state bar website [profile].
Most states have something like that as well and when somebody's been, when a lawyer's been sanctioned, you can see
what they've been sanctioned for what happened, what the accusations were and so on and so forth. Now,
I don't say necessarily that you should not consider a lawyer that's been sanctioned.
Sometimes people make mistakes.
Sometimes you still want to hire the lawyer even after knowing that he or she has been sanctioned and that's fine.
But make sure that you know, all the facts, all the details of a lawyer that you're thinking about hiring.
So that's tip
number two. Tip number three is you want to make sure that you're
compatible and feel comfortable with the lawyer that you're that you're thinking about hiring.
So what I mean is when you sit down with this lawyer,
Face-to-face across the table, when you speak on the telephone with this lawyer, do you feel comfortable with him or her?
Do you feel like they understand you do? Do you feel like they care? About the case.
Do you feel like it's somebody that you're going to
feel comfortable calling over the next period of months or possibly even years, that they're gonna be representing you?
it's super super important that you have a
compatibility and you feel comfortable with your lawyer because it's a relationship that's going to last for months if not years.
You want to make sure that you feel okay talking to that person. That's tip number three.
Tip number four is
a tip that's a little bit counterintuitive.
Okay
Which is you want to make sure that when you speak to a lawyer that you're thinking about hiring that
they don't go along with whatever you say, and let me explain what I mean by this.
You want to make sure that when you're talking to a lawyer that you're thinking about hiring that
they're not just telling you whatever you want to hear. Okay, if you say something if you bring up concerns
if you
make demands of your lawyer and the answer is always yes. Yes, uh-huh. Uh-huh. No problem. Yeah, whatever you want. Whatever you want.
Whatever you want that to me is a big red flag, okay.
That doesn't mean necessarily that you cannot be in agreement with your lawyer on most big items.
But make sure that when you're speaking to a lawyer
okay that you're speaking to somebody that you think really knows what they're agreeing to and is
gearing up to actually go through with what they agree on. Okay, that's tip. Number four. Tip number five is
social proof.
When you think about hiring a lawyer, if at all possible you want to speak to somebody who knows that lawyer.
So what do I mean I mean either a former client,
somebody who knows the person the lawyer personally.
Possibly another lawyer, that's dealt with the lawyer. Okay, you want to get some sort of social proof.
Okay, so, you know somebody that knows the lawyer and you can ask that person
what they think of the lawyer. You can judge based off of you know, what the individual says.
Sometimes you might even want to judge on that person's intonation or body language, you know, sometimes somebody can give a begrudging
endorsement and that's all information that you want to know.
One quick thing on this if you're in one practice area
and if you're talking to a competitor of that lawyer in the practice area,
you might want to take what they the competitor says with a grain of salt because remember, of course, this is a
competitive field and if you're talking to a competitor of the lawyer, they may be
incentivized to possibly
shed
shed a little bit of doubt on the lawyer that you're talking to.