Many people faced with legal problems think that they want a cheap lawyer. They shop for a lawyer with a low hourly rate, pay a modest retainer, and hope their problem is solved. Often, the total bill mysteriously adds up, and the case takes a lot longer to resolve than the client was expecting. Sometimes the client even has to hire a different lawyer, usually a more expensive one, to fix mistakes the first lawyer made. Thus, a cheap lawyer can be a pretty bad deal. If someone is maintaining a traditional practice with cheap rates, it's likely they're inexperienced, or are having problems keeping client, and a rate that's noticeably cheaper than rates in the same neighborhoods may be a reg flag.
However, the point of Verbeck Law and similar sites is that you can get good legal work done for cheap. Some of the things that make legal work expensive actually aren't necessary to the practice of law, and, in our opinion, distract from quality work. Big fancy offices are a good example. Think about the beautiful decor in a casino; what does that tell you about what's going to happen to your money? And how much time are the lawyers spending dealing with landscaping people or artwork rental services, instead of doing research? We use virtual offices when we need them, so when you pay us for legal work, you're not helping pay office building rent.
So why do people look for things like fancy office buildings when selecting a lawyer? Partially, people want to feel certain that their lawyer is talented enough to make money and stay in business, but partially, people don't have much to compare. Most people don't need lawyers very often, and only interact with lawyers in rare, specific environments. A cheap lawyer, one with a bad office or no office, probably isn't any good, right?
Sadly we've run into a lot of poor attorneys with amazing desks, and we've been pleased to run into some great attorneys who can't be bothered to maintain an office in any of the cities they operate in. Nor does an office point towards stability; Over the last decade, many top firms have suddenly ripped in half, spilling shite-shoe lawyers all over the market. In our opinion, this is good. It indicates, among other things, that clients are getting more intelligent about legal services.
Fundamentally, if you need legal work done for not very much money, but you still want it done well, it's your responsibility to become an intelligent consumer of legal services. You need to learn what sort of help you're likely to need for your case, and you're going to have to figure out how to analyze pitches from different kinds of attorneys. It's like hunting for a car: if you want quality and can't pay a huge premium for it outright, you better know your stuff.
Verbeck Law is based on the idea that, if potential clients learn more about the law from us, they'll be more likely to select us to help them with their cases. So when we tell you that many divorce cases come to a settlement outside of court, maybe this makes you less likely to hire a fully retained attorney for your case, but we hope you'll think about hiring us for a brief consultation on how to make a good settlement more likely. This could be the difference between spending a few thousand dollars on your case and a few hundred, by the way. Which sounds like a better deal to you?