Vet Your Lawyer

When I was working in the marketing department at Thomson Reuters, my job was to research law firms across the country, and then edit our marketing materials so that they were uniquely targeted to each specific prospect law firm. I knew the number of lawyers, where they went to school, how many offices and locations they had, what their practice areas were, what clients they represented, the judges they appeared before, the cases they handled, the issues they briefed, and the results. All of this so that we could more effectively sell them our products and services geared to lawyers, such as our online legal research database (Westlaw – which I had previously been teaching lawyers how to use), law books, and practice guides. A significant portion of our business (known as Findlaw) also involved helping lawyers market themselves to prospective clients, since the more money the lawyers made, the more they could buy from us. I came to know a great deal about a great many law firms of all sizes and in all parts of the country. It occurred to me that not only was this detailed level of information useful in selling to law firms, it would also be useful in choosing among those law firms for one’s own legal representation. And in fact, liability insurance companies and Fortune 1000 companies have been doing exactly that for decades. They don’t worry about the cost of vetting these law firms because the value of what is at stake in the lawsuit and the fees they will pay the law firm make the relatively small cost of vetting a worthwhile investment.

I realized that the typical prospective client, be that a woman trying to salvage the family’s real estate portfolio in a messy divorce, or the entrepreneurial inventor trying to navigate the next level of complexity in a growing business, would not have the foggiest notion about getting that kind of objective, independent information. Most lawyers can’t even do that. Consequently, they can’t make an intelligent choice of legal representation based on a review of actual performance. Instead they typically rely on word-of-mouth, which can be terribly uninformed – again, even among lawyers. One Findlaw study found that most people simply hired the first lawyer they talked to!

I call what I do “client side” legal consulting, because there are lots of legal management consultants out there (including one owned by Thomson Reuters) helping big firms maximize profits and find new clients. But no one was helping the clients themselves. I found a cadre of crack legal researchers to work with me, and Vet Your Lawyer was born.

On the personal level, for individuals and small business needing an attorney for a one time event, there is the simple vetting service. For those with more complex matters or in need of long term representation across a number of issues, there is the consulting service. This is available where you don’t have in-house counsel to do it for you, or your in-house counsel wishes to have our assistance.

But why pay us for this service when there are so many free sources out there? I go into this in more detail in The High Cost of Free, but for now let me just say that in most cases, someone IS getting paid to refer you to a lawyer, and the person paying them is the lawyer they send you to. That doesn’t mean they are bad people, but it does mean that their interests are aligned with the law firm, not you.

That’s why we take no advertising, referral fees, or any other form of kickback from lawyers. We only work for the customers that hire us, so our judgment and recommendations are not clouded with divided loyalties. And since we don’t work on contingency, we don’t care about the potential value of your case or how deep your pockets are. We just look for the best lawyer for your situation that we can find, and we do that whether what’s at stake is a government investigation that could destroy the company, or your right to see your kids this weekend.

Now of course we do know some lawyers. We even like one or two . Lawyers hire us to find other lawyers with the right qualifications just like non-lawyers do. But our recommendations are always based on objective criteria that each customer has helped us define, not a network of friends and paymasters. Whatever law firm makes the final cut in our search for you, we will disclose any past interactions, personal or professional, that we’ve had with those forms. It is standard policy to give each customer three different firms to choose from. And far from distrusting lawyers, this service rewards good lawyers who may not have the connections to get word of mouth referrals, or the marketing budget to buy splashy websites and TV ads.

So that’s what we do here at Vet Your Lawyer (VYL). We aren’t your attorney, we help you find your attorney. Call now, toll free, at 877-546-8281, and let’s get started.