If you are pursuing a personal injury claim in Maine, you may want to involve a personal injury lawyer to better your chances of fair compensation. Among the things you need to do when picking a lawyer is visit their offices in person for a free initial consultation.
If it’s your first time visiting a lawyer’s office, you may not know what to expect. This guide can tell you what to expect from your free consultations and the facts you may need to gather while there.
It Should Be Free
If a lawyer claims to offer free consultation, it should be entirely free. So, irrespective of the offices you visit for an initial consultation, it should cost you nothing, which is good because it allows you to weigh your options.
However, it is important to understand that most law firms only offer one free consultation and may have a time limit. If you hope to have more meetings, you may need to hire them or pay for their time.
You Are Not Obligated to Hire a Lawyer After the Consultation
The legal offices you visit in person should be a shortlist of the options you had at the beginning. For example, you could have started with ten and narrowed them to three.
In this case, the in-person visit can help you get the best out of the three, and the best way to determine this can be by visiting all three if you must. The free initial consultations are more like the lawyer’s job interview; you do not have to hire the first lawyer you consult.
It’s Your Time to Ask All the Questions You May Have
In your initial consultation, there is so much about your lawyer or the law firm you may not know, so use this time to ask all your questions. For example, seek to know their pricing, experience with similar cases, resources, etc.
After dishing out your case details, ask them about the firm’s practices and specifics about your own legal predicament. Some of the questions you may want to ask are their honest opinion on your chances of winning, a rough estimate of the value of your claim, the estimated duration of the case, deadlines, etc. This is the information you will use to compare the lawyers you consult with.
Pay Attention to Their Soft Skills
Engaging a lawyer means they have to work with you through the process. As such, you want to work with someone you can get along with.
So, you must consider a lawyer’s soft qualities, such as empathy, communication, and listening skills.
Other soft skills you may want to pay attention to are attention to detail and organization skills, which can impact your case outcomes.
Pay Attention to Resource Allocation
The more resources a law firm can allocate to a case, the higher the chances of a positive outcome. One way of determining if a law firm has adequate resources is the time allocation during the initial consultation.
For the not-so-serious cases, you should get nothing less than 30 minutes. For more complex cases, an hour may be the bare minimum. If they rush through their consultation, it may indicate time constraints, which should be a red flag as you want a lawyer to allocate your case as much time as possible.
