How do you choose the right wrongful death attorney?

In selecting an attorney, word of mouth is obviously a great resource, but the problem with word of mouth is a lot of time, people are referring to their friend or their acquaintance. They really may not have that actual expertise in wrongful death. 

In the more modern era, there are lots of websites out there, such as Super Lawyers, lawyers.com, Martindale Hubbell, that purport to refer you to lawyers specialized in your area. Some of the problems with that choice selection, though, are that those lawyers have subscribed to be on those websites. Some of them are very capable. Some of them not. There’s not a good vetting of those lawyers for those websites. Google reviews and Yelp reviews can also be helpful. In that, at least it gives you an idea of what that lawyer’s interactions with their clients are like. Some lawyers are very good at interacting with clients, but they may not be that good at dealing with insurance companies. There’s a limitation in relying too heavily on reviews. 

Another great way to help find a lawyer is to look for a lawyer with a web page specific to your issues and questions. If their webpage is general and their practice area includes everything from construction defect to family law, then that’s probably not a good wrongful death personal injury attorney. If their web page focuses on injury and injury victims, then that’s more likely going to be a good resource for you. 

There are some pros and cons to all of those, and the reality is. You should do a combination of all of them. You should take a look at who is on the big referral sites, who’s on Yelp, who’s on Google with good reviews? Maybe who do you know? Take a look at their website and see if it is that the right fit for me preliminarily. Besides researching the lawyer and the law firm’s background, there are few other factors you should take into account, such as the size of the law firm and the geographic location of the law firm.  

Some of the best lawyers I have worked with are from small counties or have a solo practitioner or maybe just one partner. They can be absolutely fantastic lawyers, but they’re typically fantastic general-purpose lawyers. When you’re in a small county, you find yourself practicing what’s sometimes known as door law. It’s whatever comes inside your door. One of the challenges of choosing a lawyer from a rural community is that that lawyer typically has to handle lots of different matters with different variety. So they may have clients in the morning for criminal law matter, clients during the lunch hour for a family law matter, and clients in the afternoon for a negligence matter. They can be very good at handling all those different matters, but they really don’t become experts or very particularly skilled in one particular area, like you can get in a larger city. 

So choosing a lawyer for a larger city usually makes sense for larger cases. When choosing an attorney from a larger city as well, it’s sometimes better to choose a lawyer that’s not in a small firm, such as with only one or two attorneys. The problem with a small firm is that as litigation heats up, it can completely consume that law firm’s resources. All of their staff becomes dedicated to working on that particular file, and if that file is not yours, you’re getting pushed down the road unnecessarily. 

The flipside of hiring a large firm with dozens of lawyers is you can find yourself just a single person in a large mill, and one associate comes and goes the next day, and someone new is having to get up to speed on your file. 

Most people find the most satisfaction when they’re hiring a mid-size firm. A mid-sized firm between 5 and 15 attorneys typically has the resources to handle, no matter what the workload is with respect to a trial. They also have the resources financially to back the expert witnesses, but yet they are also small enough to give you the attention to detail that you need. 

The last comment I have about choosing attorneys is geographics. Ideally, you want to choose an attorney whose office you could personally walk into, and that can be a bit slippery on today’s Internet. There are lots of attorneys from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco that are setting up satellite offices here in Sacramento or other counties and claiming to be from here. The reality is they never actually show up. They are working out of a post office box, or they have a staff person. You want to hire an attorney that you can physically walk into their office when you’re ready to work on your case, sit down across from the attorney or the staff person, and work together towards a result. You don’t want to have to be phoning it into Los Angeles. 

The other challenge of hiring a lawyer from Los Angeles or San Diego, or elsewhere is that the insurance company bets that lawyer doesn’t really want to come to Sacramento to go to trial. If you hire a Sacramento lawyer such as our office, we are six blocks from the courthouse. That insurance company knows that we’re willing to go to trial because it’s just a walk down the street compared to a flight and hotel rooms for somebody else. You don’t want an insurance company calling an attorney’s bluff because they are not in the community.