How to Know When You Need a Criminal Defence Lawyer, How to Choose Defence Counsel & How to Save Money on Your Legal Fees
/How to Know When you Need a Criminal Defence Lawyer
Knowing when you need a lawyer can be a lot more challenging that knowing when you need to call a plumber. A pipe bursts in your basement, water sprays everywhere, and you’ll probably be Googling for plumber contact info in no time.
But legal problems, even criminal law problems, can more insidiously creep up on you, and making legal decisions without a lawyer is more a part of our daily lives. Even when the police approach you to ask “just a few questions” usually takes place without legal advice, or even a warning of your right to counsel, if you’re only being treated at that point as a witness rather than a suspect in a crime.
Generally the best way to tell if you need a criminal defence lawyer is based on risk. Meaning, before you speak to the police about anything other than providing your basic name and address contact identification details, you should absolutely get advice from a lawyer. You might subjectively believe your risk to be low, but as a non-lawyer who isn’t in possession of all the facts and motivations the police have, it’s impossible for you to come to a rational conclusion about true risk.
Witnesses can quickly turn into suspects. Information gathered by the police that won’t be used against you in a criminal context could be turned over to civil authorities or a private insurer to be used against you civilly or administratively. You may have absolutely no obligation to share any information with the police, or you might be required by legislation to provide information - and even the police won’t be able to accurately inform you on your obligations, as they mostly aren’t trained as lawyers, and certainly aren’t working for you as your own lawyer.
How to Choose Criminal Defence Counsel
There’s all sorts of mythology out there concerning how to choose a lawyer. Traditionally, everyone relied upon word of mouth, which still works to a degree. However, many of us in our personal lives may have only dealt with a lawyer a couple of times previously - perhaps to buy a house - and won’t be able to easily ask friends and family to come up with lawyer names for criminal defence.
Fortunately we’ve moved away from the Yellow Pages trend of whichever criminal defence lawyer was paying the most for the biggest ad received the most phone calls , to many law firms now having substantive organic content on their websites which can be evaluated as to how well criminal law subjects are explained, together with giving the background c.v. details of each lawyer.
While I like Google reviews for restaurants and hotels, I wouldn’t rely upon them for criminal defence lawyers, as they don’t reflect objective criteria for how good any legal services were, and may have more to do with simply how the legal relationship ended, whether a client was expecting a very low fee for very complicated work, or whether a client was expecting complete exoneration in the face of overwhelming evidence against him, rather than the best outcome legally obtainable. Legal services can’t be reviewed similarly to a clean hotel bathroom, which will indeed have objective factors of quality we can all readily assess.
The appropriateness of legal fees are especially hard to evaluate, as an experienced lawyer charging higher hourly rates might be able to finish work more quickly than a more junior lawyer charging lower hourly rates, and thus your hourly bill will could lower in the end even with higher hourly fees. Currently in Canada, lawyers with some experience will be typically charging between $300 and $500 an hour. Most criminal lawyers will offer fixed flat fees except for the most complicated serious matters, where it can be impossible to calculate efforts required in advance, so you’ll at least be able to budget.
While lawyer fees can vary dramatically in many practice areas, they’re actually usually quite similar for defence lawyers, except perhaps for the most junior or senior lawyers available. Simpler criminal matters can often be resolved for round $5,000, and the cost of preparing for and attending a typical trial might lead to another $10,000 in additional fees. Appeals will often start at $15,000 to $25,000. But the most complex of cases may cost over $100,000 to defend, because of the huge lawyer time investment required.
I’d suggest that the lawyer responsiveness to questions and communications generally might be the most important factor in choosing a lawyer - even if s/he can only respond via staff - as the best most experienced greatest value lawyer in the world won’t be any good to you if you can’t get your questions answered, and you never hear back from the lawyer when you have a problem you need legal help with. Thus responsiveness is likely more important than experience or value in fees, though experience and value would be my number two and three factors to evaluate carefully.
Results previously obtained should never be a factor to evaluate a lawyer upon, and you should be cautious about anyone boasting about “success” percentages on a website. For basic legal services like real estate transactions and will drafting, you have a right to essentially 100% success. For litigation like criminal defence, anyone bragging about “wins” might only be taking the easiest of cases, or might be getting creative over what a “win” even amounts to.
Usually the only result that really matters is getting the optimal outcome at a price you can afford.
How to Save Money on Your Criminal Defence Legal Fees
Generally the best way to save money on a lawyer is perhaps somewhat counterintuitively to hire them as soon as possible, rather than as late as possible. Some might think an early retainer will only run up fees, or incur charges that were never necessary, because the problem really didn’t need a lawyer in the first place. But the reality is that sometimes solely a few hours of lawyer first aid early on, or even just a one hour consultation, can head off months or even years of legal suffering that could require dozens or hundreds of lawyer hours to solve.
So the moment your mind to telling you, “hey, I think I have a real legal problem, maybe I should be getting professional advice” you should give in to that impulse. This isn’t my pitch to enrich my lawyer colleagues. We usually don’t even charge for initial contact to determine if a lawyer can help you. And basic more formal advice usually won’t cost you more than a few hundred dollars.
Sometimes the legal answer you need may be as simple as “yes” or “no” from a lawyer, like should I speak to the police, or not, but making the wrong choice without legal advice could cost you dearly.
So the best way to save money isn’t endless comparison shopping to get the cheapest lawyer hourly rate out there, isn’t putting off hiring a lawyer until things get really desperate, and isn’t planning to try to muddle through the work yourself, and only call up a lawyer now and then to explain how to do it yourself. That is like thinking the cheapest way to build a house is to pay a contractor at his hourly rate to spend hundreds of hours on the phone with you explaining every step of house building techniques to you, including how to rip out and redo all your mistakes. That kind of plan will likely lead you to spend the most rather than least possible, potentially combined with getting the worst results.
Contacting a criminal defence lawyer when the risk of a legal problem seems to you to be significant, combined with picking a lawyer mostly based on their responsiveness (with experience and value being important secondary factors), and saving money on a lawyer through contacting one as soon as possible, will best serve you in obtaining the most effective criminal defence legal services, when you need those services, at the most affordable price.
Gordon S. Campbell, B.A., LL.B., B.C.L. has served as a Federal Crown Prosecutor, Constitutional-Criminal Issues Coordinator at the Ontario Regional Office of the Department of Justice Canada, counsel to the Military Police Complaints Commission, and is author of three criminal law books. He now practices criminal defence law at a trial level in Eastern Ontario, and at an appellate level throughout Canada including at the Supreme Court of Canada.