Attorney
EFFECTIVE
It feels odd to brag about results or trial outcomes. Still, it is what clients care about and it is what they should care about. I have tried cases year in and year out for a long and successful career. I know that clients don’t hire me to stand around and wait for the prosecutor to make an offer. They hire me to work the case, get every concession I can force the prosecution to make, and then either try the case successfully or negotiate the best deal I can get for my client. In many cases, we know right from day one that this case is going to trial. I know I haven’t been hired merely to represent the client to the best of my ability. I have been hired to go to trial and to win. I am not neither so foolish nor so arrogant as to guarantee that I can win them all. In fact, if you don’t lose some cases, you aren’t trying enough of the hard ones. I do know that I can give my clients the best odds they can get anywhere.
EFFICIENT
I operate a solo practice, supported by an investigator, technology, communication systems and mobile case management. That means I can practice law out of my car or in a conference room at a distant courthouse when I have to do so. Your case will be handled in a streamlined manner using every time and labor-saving tactic I can muster. I have been in partnerships with other lawyers, worked with younger associate attorneys, and relied on staff over many years in the traditional lawyer office. I have taken great pleasure in those associations, but it is also clear that what clients want from an attorney has changed over time. What I want has changed as well. My clients all liked my staff very much, but I noticed that they preferred to call me directly whenever they could.
CONNECTED
My office has always operated with heavy dependence on technology, not to eliminate the personal element of my work but to keep better connected to the persons I work with and for. My clients’ entire files are accessible to me from home, at whatever courthouse I am working in and usually from the road. We employ an outside IT firm to maintain security and ensure that our system is reliable and that our clients’ data is safe at all times. I am not always able to take a telephone call, and sometimes I am wise enough to turn the phone off. For the most part, I am easily accessible by either phone or email. I’ll ask you how you prefer to communicate and I should be able to accommodate your preferences.
ENERGETIC
I grimace when I hear yet one more lawyer announce that he or she is “aggressive.” Oddly, it is one of the things people say about me, but I don’t think it’s the most important thing. I think a good lawyer has brains and energy, and knows how to point them in the right direction. Maybe it’s all those years of owning good-tempered pit bulls but I just can’t see aggression as a good thing in the abstract. I do think it’s important to go at a case with energy, creativity and brains. I think as a lawyer you should do your best to figure out how you want the case to go and make it happen. I hate that invented word, “proactive”, but people call me that as well. My clients come to me feeling somewhat helpless and often quite frightened, even when they don’t admit it. My job is to help them take back control and get them a menu of options to pick from.