For the next few posts I’m going to be taking a name out of the headlines and walking through what I think is a great way to review an attorney. If I needed an attorney and had a name in mind, this is most likely how I would go about it. Since I’ve personally worked in the industry for a while I can share a few secrets with you that will hopefully help you with your search.
Most of us probably all know who Floyd Mayweather, Jr. is and his recent legal troubles. His attorney is Karen Winckler from the firm Wright Stanish and Winckler, in Las Vegas, NV. If I was a boxing aficionado and fell in to some legal trouble, perhaps I would want Karen to represent me as well. Hopefully with the knowledge that you have you would do some due diligence and validate her as being an ethical and quality attorney first.
So, what is the process that you should follow? First, I would probably Google her name. When I did that the first 2 results were from the website Lawyers.com. The third was from Justia and then it lists some news articles and then other random websites.
Let’s take a look at what Lawyers.com has to say. You click on the link and it goes to her profile. There are a couple of items to look at to help you with making the best decision for yourself. The first is the profile itself. Make sure that the attorney’s main area of practice is in the same area as what you need. Attorney’s can represent multiple areas of practice. You really don’t want a bankruptcy attorney handling your criminal case. Secondly, there is a box to the right that contains both client reviews and peer rating reviews. This is where I share some secrets with you.
The peer reviews ratings are basically ratings of attorney provided by other attorneys, that are supposed to have intimate knowledge of that person’s ability and ethical standing. From what attorneys tell us, this is often just a popularity contest and if you’ve been around a long time and have lots of friends to solicit good reviews from, you’ll have a high rating. Take it for what it is, I just don’t think it should be the one thing that you use to decide if this is a good attorney or not. I know for a fact that there are really bad attorneys out there that have a perfect 5.0 rating. For the sake of this post, we’ll use it as part of our decision making process. Karen’s rating is a 4.4. Lawyers.com also provides client reviews but Karen doesn’t have a client rating. Let’s take a look at the firm though to see their rating. You should always take a look at the entire firm because you will definitely deal with them at some point also. Richard Wright has a peer review rating of 5.0 but a client review rating of 3.0. There is a bit of a discrepancy there. Let’s look deeper at that. The biggest complaint is lack of communication. The bad part though is that there is only one client review listed and I certainly don’t think that is a very good sample size to make any judgment about Richard. Overall the firm looks pretty good.
Let’s turn our attention back to Google for some help. The third post is from Justia but there is nothing there that tells us anything. That’s pretty common with that website. Looking through the rest of the page one results there is something that caught my eye. It looks like Karen Winckler also represented Dennis Rodman and his DUI case a few years back. That’s interesting and leads me to believe that perhaps she’s the criminal attorney to the stars of the sporting world. I imagine she’s very busy, especially in Las Vegas.
I would then put her name through the www.Attorneyguide.com ethical check and after doing that there is no indication that she is ethical or not. We’ll make sure she gets that updated right away.
If at this point you still wanted to hire Karen or the firm to help you with your criminal case then I would recommend you reach out to your friends and see if anyone else knows anything about them. Lastly I would pick up the phone and interview the firm. Have some questions on hand and ask them how they operate. Ask them about how quickly they get back to you, how they follow up, how they communicate, etc. You’ll be dealing with the front desk people most likely 75% of the time. Remember that your legal situation, especially a criminal case, is nothing to take lightly and hiring the right attorney can make or break your entire experience. The whole process of doing some research on an attorney literally took me about 10 minutes. Don’t you think it’s worth it?