Sitting Down With Three Attorneys? The Questions That Tell Them Apart

Most people book one consultation, like the person well enough, and hand over a retainer that afternoon. That is how you end up paying litigation prices for a case that two reasonable adults could have settled in four months. Book three meetings instead, in the same week if you can, and ask each attorney the same short list of questions in roughly the same order. The point is not to find someone brilliant. The point is to find out, before money changes hands, how this particular office actually handles a case that looks like yours.

Get the format and the cost of the meeting straight first

Some firms give thirty minutes free, some charge a flat consultation fee, and some bill the hour and credit it against a retainer if you hire them. All three are normal, and the free one is not automatically worse; it is often shorter and more of a sales conversation. Ask when you book whether the person you meet will be the person handling your file, because at larger firms the intake meeting is sometimes run by a partner and the work is done by an associate you have not met. Ask what to bring. If they tell you to bring your last two tax returns, recent pay stubs, mortgage statements and a rough list of accounts, that is a good sign, because it means they intend to talk about your actual numbers rather than about divorce in general.

Ask how often they try cases, then ask what happened to the rest

The question to ask is how many of their divorce cases went to a contested trial in the last year or two, and how many settled before that. You are not fishing for a low number or a high one. You want to hear a specific answer, delivered without defensiveness, followed by an explanation of what pushed the trial cases over the line: a spouse hiding income, a custody dispute with a safety issue, a business that neither side could value. An attorney who says almost everything settles and cannot name what makes the exception has not thought about it. An attorney who describes trial as the natural end point of most files is telling you something about how the bills will look.

Follow it with a question about your case specifically. Describe your situation in three or four sentences and ask what route they would expect it to take. A useful answer names a mechanism: an uncontested filing with a negotiated settlement agreement, a mediated resolution, a collaborative process, or a contested case with formal discovery. If the answer is that it depends entirely on your spouse, push once. Good counsel can usually tell you which two outcomes are most likely and what would tip it one way.

Find out who does the drafting and who answers the phone

Ask who writes the settlement agreement, who prepares the financial disclosures, and who you call with a two-minute question. Delegation to a paralegal is not a problem and is usually cheaper for you, provided the attorney reviews the work and you know the hourly rate for each person touching the file. What you are checking is whether anyone can give you a straight answer about the division of labor. Ask what a typical response time looks like, and ask what happens in August when your attorney is on vacation and your spouse's lawyer files something.

The stalling question is the one that separates them

Ask what they do when the other side goes quiet for six weeks. The weak answer is that they send a letter and wait. The strong answer is procedural and specific: a deadline in writing, then a motion to compel, then a request for fees, with a sense of how long each step takes in your county and what it costs. Financial stalling is a related question, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversees much of the consumer credit and account reporting that turns up in a spouse's disclosure, so ask how they trace accounts when the paperwork arrives incomplete.

Leave the fee conversation until you have heard all of that. Ask for the retainer amount, the hourly rates for everyone, what happens when the retainer runs low, and whether they will put a written estimate of the likely total range in the engagement letter. Then go home and compare your three sets of notes cold, a day later, when the room is not in your head.