When I am going to need to hire a lawyer in the future, I will want to know something about his history first. I want to know about his past cases because I want to know how successful he has been until now.
I heard somewhere that there are at least several methods for researching a lawyer’s history. One of the simplest and probably the most obvious methods is to ask other people you know about the lawyer of your choice. You might want to be careful about that though because this method can be flawed. I would be very careful listening what others have to say about an attorney because people’s perception of an attorney is often clouded by issues that have no bearing on the lawyer. It is obvious that if somebody won a case he will be happy with his lawyer. On the contrary, those who lost a case are likely to blame it on their lawyer. Very often, a lawyer might not be to blame for losing a case if there was nothing he could have done about it.
Although personal opinions can be very helpful at times allowing me to make up my mind what type of lawyer I might want to hire, there are better and more reliable ways to check on a lawyer’s history. If word of mouth is not enough, I might want to check everything that was written about the lawyer of my choice on the Internet or even in the news. Also, the longer somebody has been a lawyer, the more likely he is to be helpful. Of course, I am not saying that young lawyer fresh from law school cannot be trusted. On the contrary, young lawyers might have a lot of zeal allowing them to dedicate more resources including enthusiasm to the task. I know it from my personal experience.