If it’s something that you could’ve predicted from a mile away or if it’s something that came as a total shock to you, when the time does come for you to hire a lawyer, you might feel really uncomfortable. Maybe you’ve never been inside of a courtroom or even to a courthouse. Maybe you’ve never received a legal document before. Maybe you don’t even know what a legal document looks like. It’s completely normal to feel unsure, nervous or even scared when faced with any kind of legal dispute because it is unknown territory to you.
However, hiring a lawyer doesn’t have to be something scary or something that you’re uncomfortable with. Here are some tips to help guide you as to what you can expect from hiring legal counsel, and why you should consider hiring a lawyer. The reality is that if you don’t hire a lawyer in a situation where you really do need one, then that could turn into a nightmare and you could be walking into something that has serious repercussions that you’ll be paying for in the long run.
The first benefit of hiring a lawyer is the obvious: we know the law. Lawyers are trained and experienced to study the relevant laws for a particular situation. There are a lot of different cases to which different laws and procedures apply. For example, a civil case is different from a criminal case which is different from a divorce case which is different from an immigration case. You should look for the right kind of lawyer for your particular situation because the lawyer knows which laws are going to apply, and more importantly which laws are going to help or hurt you in your particular situation.
The next benefit of hiring a lawyer is that the lawyer acts as your advocate and your defender throughout the entire legal process so that you’re not going through this alone. A lawyer should be an experienced professional who is on your side that’s going to walk you through the entire procedure, which might be as minor as making some phone calls to the other side’s lawyer, or may be as complicated as having to go to court, or even attend a trial. Apart from the trial and some other key hearings, hiring a lawyer means you don’t have to go to court, because the lawyer representing you will do the dirty work for you and attend court hearings and handle all of that on your behalf. By hiring a lawyer, you won’t have to take off time from work nor take time away from your family or your friends to deal with whatever legal headache is upon you.
Also, its important to note that if you try to go into the courtroom as a pro se litigant (which means you’re representing yourself) the judge is going to treat you as if you are your own attorney. That kind of treatment could backfire for your and your case in that means you have to comply with all of the legal technicalities that apply to your case, including the procedures that are following in and out of the courtroom (this could be anything from how many days you have to respond to a motion or how long a trial is to the specific words you’re supposed to use when addressing the judge and addressing a courtroom). Although these details may sound like mere technicalities, the reality is they could result in serious repercussions for you and for your entire case, and it’s a risk that is not worth taking.
Another benefit of hiring a lawyer is that once you have a lawyer on your side, he/she will act as the middle man between you and the other side, so that you are no longer responsible for communicating or speaking to the other side especially if the other side has an attorney. Once you hire an attorney, that attorney is going to communicate to any and all other attorneys involved in your particular case in order to do everything he/she can to reach a resolution for your case.
In sum, the benefits of hiring a lawyer are:
- We know the law and we are familiar with the legal proceedings and technicalities that you should know if you’re ever involved in any type of legal battle.
- We act as the middle man for you, because we communicate between you and the other side and the other lawyer so you don’t have to do that.
3. We do the dirty work by going to court on your behalf and saving you from taking away time from your work and personal life.