Interviewing three attorneys? Four questions that return numbers instead of reassurance

The trouble with a free consultation is that it is designed to reassure you, and reassurance does not compare. Sit through three of them and you will hear three versions of the same sentence, delivered warmly, about how every case is different and how the office will fight for you and how the other side's attorney is someone they know well. None of that can be set beside anything else. What you need instead is a short set of questions whose answers arrive as figures, names, and dates, because figures can be written down in a column and read across.

Ask how many cases like yours the office closed last year

Not how many years of experience, which is unfalsifiable and usually irrelevant, but how many matters of your specific shape the office resolved in the last twelve months. A contested custody case with a relocation issue is not the same animal as an uncontested dissolution with a marital settlement agreement already drafted. If the answer is a real number, four, or thirty, or two, you have something. If the answer is a range with a shrug attached, note that too, because an office that tracks its own closings differently from an office that does not is telling you something about how it runs its files, its billing, and its calendar.

Follow it with a second half: how many of those went to trial. A firm that closed twenty-five similar matters and tried one is describing a settlement practice, and a firm that tried six is describing something else. Neither is wrong. But you should know which one you are hiring, because the fee structure, the retainer size, and the pace of the next eight months all follow from it.

Ask who stands up at the hearing, by name

The person across the table at the consultation is frequently not the person who will appear at your temporary orders hearing, and that substitution is normal, defensible, and entirely worth knowing about in advance. Ask for the name. Ask whether that person's hourly rate differs from the one you were quoted, and by how much. Ask who covers if that attorney has a conflict on your date, which happens often in county and district courts where several matters are set for the same morning. A firm that answers cleanly, with a name and a rate, has thought about coverage. A firm that says the team handles it has told you nothing you can compare against the firm down the street.

The same applies to the paralegal. In many offices, the paralegal drafts the financial disclosures, assembles the exhibits, and answers your calls, all at a lower rate, and that is usually good for you. Ask what that rate is and roughly what share of the work it covers.

Ask what a settled case cost and what a tried case cost

This is the question that separates a useful consultation from a pleasant one. You are not asking for a quote on your matter, which no honest attorney can give you before discovery. You are asking for two historical figures: the total billed on a comparable case that settled at mediation, and the total billed on a comparable case that went to a contested hearing or trial. Most attorneys who have been practicing locally for a while can give you both, at least as approximations, and the gap between those two numbers is the single most important thing you will learn all week. It tells you what settling is worth in dollars.

Ask also what triggered the second retainer in those cases, and at what point in the calendar it landed. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tracks how consumers encounter unexpected charges in financial agreements generally, and a legal fee agreement behaves the same way: the surprise is rarely the hourly rate, it is the volume of hours nobody described in advance.

Write the answers in a grid before you leave the parking lot

Memory blurs consultations together within about a day, and the warm one starts to feel like the competent one. So put the four answers on paper immediately: closings, trials, the name of the person appearing, the two historical totals. Three columns, four rows. What you will usually find is that one office answered every question with a number and the others answered two of four, and that pattern, more than any single figure, is the comparison you came for.

You are not looking for the cheapest answer. You are looking for the office that keeps records precise enough to answer at all, because that same precision is what will show up later in your billing statements.