Is Free Legal Advice Valuable or Should I Hire an Attorney?
Are you wondering is free legal advice valuable or should I hire an attorney? If you have recently been arrested and looking for a lawyer to represent you, you will probably come across free consultations and legal advice. The first question that will pop into your mind is, is free legal advice valuable, or should I hire an attorney? It can seem too good to be true, and frequently, it is.
Keep reading on to learn whether or not free legal advice is valuable or if you should hire an attorney to represent you in court.
You Get What You Pay For When It Comes To Attorneys
When you call a lawyer for a free consultation/advice, you will get what you pay for. Lawyers are not sitting around waiting to help people for free when they receive calls about their free consultations. Instead, they will try to sell themselves to you because they want you to choose them to represent you.
Sure, they might give you some very basic advice, but it is nothing you could not have gotten off of Google from an article or two. That is because the best lawyers know that they can not give you advice based on your personal case without many different reports and files and speaking with you beforehand. All of this will take a lot of time and can only be done if you are a client of theirs.
So when you call a lawyer for “free advice,” you are not getting anything of value. You will probably waste your time as the lawyer tries to sell themself to you, so you hire them. Take your time, look around for lawyers, and then contact the ones you want to represent you.
The Quality of Free Advice Is Not the Same
When you choose to use free legal advice or consultation, the quality of the advice you receive will rarely be good. Lawyers offering free consultations normally lack the professionalism you want in a good lawyer and are normally desperate for clients, hence the free consultation offer.
Any good lawyer providing you with their undivided attention and good legal advice will normally only offer paid consultations. This allows them to understand your case properly and figure out how best they can help you.
So if you want high-quality legal advice, you should seek a lawyer who offers paid consultations. If you do not really care about the advice you receive, and are simply looking for anything at all, then free consultations are out there for you. This should help to answer your question is free legal advice valuable or should I hire an attorney.
Free Advice Could Cost You More Money In the Long Run
Another problem with free consultations is they can actually cost you more money in the long run. While this may seem counter-intuitive, free consultations rarely give you good advice and do not allow the lawyer to get a good understanding of your case. This means if you decide to hire them, you may wind up working with a lawyer who is not actually a good choice for you.
Not only that, but when you get a free consultation, the lawyer can not help you figure out how they could help you in limited ways if you do not want their full services. By partaking in a paid consultation, you can get real advice on your case and find ways that a lawyer can help you even if you can not afford full representation.
Consultation
We offer a Paid Consultation for those who may have questions regarding criminal charges. This can be very helpful to those who just want to have a good discussion about a situation, but don’t necessarily need to hire a lawyer, or aren’t sure if they need an attorney. There are many topics and issues we can help with. Importantly, everything we discuss is confidential. If this is what you need, just click here to schedule a paid consultation with one of our experienced attorneys.
Discuss Case in Full Detail
Another reason to hire an attorney instead of relying on free legal advice is that you can not fully discuss your case in full in a free consultation. This means that the lawyer will not have a good grasp on your case, will not know how best to help you, and may not be the best option for you. This could lead to spending more money down the line because you hire a lawyer that can not truly help you.
Free consultations and legal advice are not going to help you out here. By paying for a consultation, you show the lawyer you want the best representation you can get, and they can provide more benefits to you. This helps narrow your search for the right attorney and can only be achieved by paying for a consultation.
Legal Advice Protection
Another reason to hire an attorney and not rely on the free legal advice given at free consultations is lawyers can not give you actual legal advice if you are not a client. So, if you are not paying for their services, they can not give you legal advice, which means you will get nothing of value from a free consultation.
Lawyers have malpractice insurance, but this only covers them for legal advice given to their clients, hence why they can not give legal advice during free consultations. If they were to give you legal advice, you acted on it and then turned around and sued them; then their insurance would not cover them.
So to protect their careers, you will have to be a client if you want to receive legal advice from a lawyer. If you want legal advice, you must hire an attorney or at least pay for a consultation to determine your options. A free consultation will not benefit you and will not give you the knowledge you need to move forward. This is another aspect of your question is free legal advice valuable or should I hire an attorney.
Free Consultations Limit Fair Representation
Another reason free consultations are not the best option is they limit the ability of each party to seek out counsel actively. A common strategy is when one party contacts the major lawyers in the area for consultations to prevent them from working with the other party.
By providing only paid consultations, it not only provides proper legal advice to each party but also limits the number of consultations either party can schedule. This keeps one party from essentially gatekeeping the other party from accessing the legal advice they need to be fairly represented in court.
Conclusion: Is Free Legal Advice Valuable Or Do I Need A Lawyer
While free legal advice does exist, it is neither valuable nor worth your time. If you need legal advice, it is better to pay for a consultation and find out if they will be a good fit for you. Even if you do not need full representation, you could still get the limited representation that a free consultation would not inform you about.
You should now have a better answer to your question: is free legal advice valuable or should I hire an attorney.
