Criminal Defense Law Firms

How to choose a criminal defense firm

Every other area in this directory is chosen at leisure. This one is usually chosen within a day of an arrest, by somebody who has never needed a lawyer before, from a list of search results. The three things below are the ones most likely to be misunderstood in that first day, and the first of them changes what every fee page you are about to read can legally say.

Nobody may charge you a contingency fee for a criminal case

In injury work the fee is a share of what the case recovers, and a firm that recovers nothing is paid nothing. That arrangement is prohibited in a criminal matter. Rule 1.5(d) of the rules of professional conduct, adopted in substantially this form in every state, forbids a lawyer from entering into a fee contingent on the outcome of a criminal case. There is no "no fee unless we win" here, and a firm offering one is offering something it is not allowed to.

So the fee is a flat fee, an hourly rate, or a flat fee per stage: one amount through arraignment and pretrial, another if the case goes to trial. That second structure is the one that surprises people, because the number quoted on the phone is often the first stage only. Ask what the quoted figure covers, what happens to it if the case resolves early, and what the trial fee would be.

This is also why the fee column on these rankings reads differently from the injury ones. We count firms that publish a flat fee, and most publish no figure at all. An absence is recorded as an absence rather than filled in.

• What does the quoted fee cover, and where does it stop?
• Is there a separate trial fee, and how much is it?
• Are investigators, experts and transcripts inside the fee or billed on top?
• What happens to the fee if the case is dismissed at the first appearance?

Ask who will stand up at the arraignment, by name

Criminal defense includes some of the highest volume practices in law. A firm whose name is on the door may send a different lawyer to each appearance, and in a high volume practice that is not necessarily bad: the lawyer who is in that courthouse every week knows the judge and the assistant district attorney in a way the named partner may not. What is bad is not being told.

The roster on each profile here is the firm’s own published list of attorneys, read from its site, and where the state publishes a register we check each name against it and say how many matched. That tells you how many lawyers the firm has. It cannot tell you which of them is assigned to you, and that is the question to ask before you pay anything.

A public defender is not a worse lawyer, and a disposition is not an acquittal

Two things a directory with an incentive to sell you a private lawyer would not say. The first: public defenders are specialists who do this work and nothing else, in the courthouse they appear in daily, and in many places they are the most experienced trial lawyers in the room. The real difference is caseload, not ability. If you are assigned one, the question is how much time your case will get, not whether the lawyer is any good.

The second: most criminal cases end without a trial, so "results" in this area mostly means dispositions. A charge reduced, a case adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, a plea to a violation rather than a crime, a record sealed afterwards. Those are real outcomes and they are worth asking about, and none of them is an acquittal. Where a firm publishes case results on its own site we count them and say on the profile that the figures are the firm’s and that we did not confirm them. In this practice that caveat does more work than in any other.