I have seen quite a few emails lately about people needing an attorney in different locations.
There are a few good ways to find an attorney:
1. Personal recommendation of friends or family. This is the best way to find an attorney. If you use this method, make sure you tell the attorney that you were referred by so-and-so, who is a family member or a friend.
2. Through your work. Some employers like Intel, the state, UCDavis, offer employee benefits for legal services. If your employer offers this, call the hotline and get a recommendation. Those attorneys have been checked thoroughly by the service.
3. The internet. Not just some random search on the internet. That will not yield good results. I tell people to check out Avvo, www.avvo.com. Avvo is an independent rating website that lists every attorney in the state and covers about 80% of all attorneys nationwide. Avvo rates attorneys on a scale from 1 to 10. The method is proprietary. But, in addition to the numerical ranking, which by the way is the first scoring system for attorneys that people can make sense of, there are endorsements from other attorneys, client reviews and more information about the attorney. Overall, it gives you a complete view of the attorney.
Avvo has been used by several national magazines to compile lists of the best attorneys in certain fields. Avvo has also been used to compile lists of the best attorneys in geographical regions by newspapers, magazines and websites.
You can use Avvo to search for an attorney by practice area, ie debt collection, consumer law, lemon law, and in a certain area, be it California, Sacramento or Elk Grove. Another way to use this is to get a recommendation of an attorney and then put their name in Avvo and see what Avvo has to say. This will let you verify that the recommendation you received is a good one.
Hiring an attorney is a very personal decision. You want to make sure that you hire the right attorney for you. That may, or may not, be the right attorney for someone else. However, using these three things should get you the right attorney.