Phone Call and A Check

In How many lawyers do you need? I discussed hiring attorneys and lawyer advertising. Now, I'm going to rip a specific form of lawyer advertising, which is the former client or an actor holding a check and saying something like: all I did was call personal injury attorney ____ and I got $____. Those commercials and similar ones make me sick. They make those of us who represent real victims who were badly injured and who respect the legal profession and our civil justice system look like leeches, which may be a fair description for lawyers running those ads, but not for real Wisconsin personal injury lawyers.

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Wisconsin Police may be Listening

In a loss for child molesters or those attempting to molest children (and advertising that on the Internet), the Wisconsin Court of Appeals handed down State v John David Ohlinger, 2008AP135. Ohlinger's horrific personal legal history can be see (partially) on Wisconsin's Circuit Court Access. In any event, the Ohlinger decisions upholds Wisconsin law, which allows police to listen to any phone conversation as long as one party consents to the police listening. If the person consenting to the police listening happens to also be a police officer (rather than a private citizen), that doesn't matter as long as they are a party to the phone call.

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How many lawyers do you need?

Saw an outstanding Wisconsin employment discrimination lawyer today and one topic was a personal injury attorney who boasts about the size of his law firm. The discrimination attorney (who's firm has about 10 employees or so) said overhead would concern him there and I've always had issues with unusually large personal injury firms. One concern I've had in Milwaukee is that personal injury lawyers use paid advertising excessively adding to overhead and causing some injury firms to need thousands of clients. At a certain point, partners in these firms lose the ability to see to it that paralegals and lawyers give top level service even if named partners are great lawyers. The next thing that may happen is that associate lawyers feel a need to bring in money and then because they have hundreds of clients at a time, these injury atttorneys settle cases cheaply, which may turn a law firm into a personal injury mill.

I don't know the perfect way how to hire a Wisconsin personal injury lawyer, but I gave direction in Wisconsin personal injury Super Lawyers too. Let me add, that unlike Milwaukee's corporate law firms (e.g. Michael Best, Reinhart, Whyte) where companies need lots of "specialists" (e.g. real estate, regulation, intellectual property, tax, etc.), personal injury clients don't. Rarely, if ever, will an injured party need more than two lawyers at any one injury law firm, so you really shouldn't care "how big" a firm is or "how many" lawyers such a firm has, only whether the one or two attorneys you hire are the ones you're willing to live with for your personal injury case.

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