How to Pick the Right Attorney

Celebrity Lawyer Christopher C. Melcher, who is ranked as a best family law attorney in California, explains how you can find the right attorney for your specific needs.

David Chudyk (00:06):

Your attorney can be one of the most important people in your life. And today we have the privilege of speaking with Christopher C. Melcher, a top family law attorney in Los Angeles, California, who is a known as a high profile divorce attorney. He is a partner of Walzer Melcher Yoda LLP, which is ranked as a best family law firm in California. And Chris and I- we’re going to be having a conversation about how to pick an attorney, talk about how to find the right attorney, how to find an attorney who has the type of communication style that you need, some red flags to look for before hiring your attorney, and some questions to ask your attorney prior to beginning an engagement.

David Chudyk (00:40):

This is The Weekly Wealth Podcast with Certified Financial Planner, David Chudyk, where we discuss the wealth building mindsets and tactics that can help you to build and maintain wealth for you, your family, and your business.

David Chudyk (00:50):

Hello everybody and welcome to this week’s episode of the Weekly Wealth Podcast. We are a podcast where we talk about the mindsets, the tactics, and the strategies to help you to build and maintain wealth. My name is David Chudyk and I am a financial advisor with Parallel Financial… But today we’re talking a little bit of a different topic. We’re talking with Chris Melcher and he is a high profile divorce attorney, but we’re going to talk about the attorney business in general and how to pick an attorney and just those things like that because attorneys are part of that subset of society that you don’t need ’em until you need ’em, and then they’re pretty darn important. So hey Chris, how are you?

Christopher C. Melcher (01:36):

Fine, David. Thanks for having me on the show. And I’m super happy to be talking about this topic because as a lawyer, I’m seeing clients sometimes pick a great advocate and doing really well with it, and then also other times picking the wrong person and suffering for it. So my goal here in the time that we’re spending together is to share what would I do if I was looking for a lawyer for myself and share those kind of tips. So if any of you find yourself in a position where you have to hire a lawyer, you’re going to be in a lot better position.

Tips For Hiring a Lawyer

David Chudyk (02:00):

Yeah. So obviously you pass the bar and your main area of practice is divorce, but legally you could try a death row case, right? People take attorneys know every part of the law, but you don’t even know all the divorce law. And certainly in other parts of the law you probably have very, very little knowledge.

Christopher C. Melcher (02:14):

That’s right. You bring up a great point, David, is that in law, once you get your license, you could take a death row murder trial, you could do a divorce case, you could handle a business dispute case. The license applies across your state and without restriction, unlike other areas, other professions where the license would be limited or specialized, we just turn these lawyers loose and it’s a failure of the system I think because not all lawyers have the same experience and passionate about the law and how is the client to know. And so there are some analogies to medicine that we can get into because you’re more likely to have picked a doctor, you’re more likely to have gone to a doctor many times and understand what their specialization is. But you’re probably unlikely to have dealt with a lawyer before. So that is a parallel that we may be using in some of this to understand how you’re actually picking a lawyer.

David Chudyk (03:00):

Sure. Well, and I want to preface this whole episode because talking to a divorce attorney right now, I just hit my 22nd wedding anniversary and you and I kind of met up through some internet networking sites, but everybody out there, every guy is fighting for the title of having the second best wife out there. I have the first. So if anybody’s listening, no, I am not using Christopher divorce attorney and I will never need a divorce attorney. So we have that out of the way. But let me ask you this. So did you take more classes regarding divorce law in law school than maybe somebody else who took business classes because more of a business law or do you get your experience and expertise once you’re post law school?

Christopher C. Melcher (03:30):

It’s all post law school… in law school they teach you how to analyze a legal problem, but they do not teach you how to practice law. When I was in law school, I graduated in 1993, I was going to be a corporate securities attorney. That was my goal. And so the classes that I took were tax.

David Chudyk (03:47):

Are you crazy? I mean, why would anybody have that as a goal? A corporate securities attorney?

Christopher C. Melcher (03:50):

Because you can make a lot of money doing it.

David Chudyk (03:51):

There you go. All right.

Christopher C. Melcher (03:53):

So unfortunately though, when I got out, the economy was in recession and there was no hiring. I had a very humble beginning or humble start to my career. And I was practicing law out of my bedroom in my parents’ house and started doing personal injury, plaintiff’s side doing criminal defense and made enough money where I was able to buy a house and do fairly well.

But it was through happenstance that I got into divorce law and in 2002, met up with a gentleman, international divorce lawyer Peter Walzer, who had an office down the hall from me, and he was a family law specialist on his own, and we hooked up together and me, him and a secretary then all these years later have built a law firm, eight lawyers only handling divorce throughout the state of California. We have high profile clientele, I mean a-list celebrities (celebrity divorce), multi-millionaires, billionaires. It’s an amazing transformation. But it was all learned during practice of law. I don’t really reach back to much of law school experience for it. It was me going out there and figuring this stuff out case by case, oftentimes losing, and then just having a passion for law, eat, sleep, drink, everything, family law.

David Chudyk (04:55):

Okay, well that’s pretty cool stuff. So if I needed an attorney of any kind, whether it be business law or I’m buying some property or criminal defense or any of that, I mean law is such a broad category, how would I know who’s the attorney that I should pick? I don’t know where you went to law school. Does it matter? Are different law schools, do they prepare you better to think about law? What are some of the things that you would look for if you needed an attorney yourself?

How to Pick a Lawyer for Yourself

Christopher C. Melcher (05:15):

Sure. And I’ve given this a lot of thought because it’s easy for me to say as a divorce lawyer in Los Angeles who to pick because I know everybody. So I’m looking at it from the client’s perspective. And we have a lot of difficulty I think, as a client trying to pick a lawyer because like I said, this may be the first time that you’ve ever had to select one. Number two, there’s a legal problem going on that may be stressful to you, highly personal, like a divorce or you’re getting sued or you got injured. So that’s going to affect things. And then there may be urgency. So there may not be a lot of time to select the lawyer. So all these things are kind of working against you. And so many people will go to the internet and look, that is one avenue.

(05:52):

But when you’re looking at that, the website of the lawyer is basically a fluff piece. It’s their communication that they’re writing about themselves and it’s all like, oh, this person is so great. I don’t really pay much attention to that. There’s rating services like super lawyers. I don’t pay any attention to that because those mean nothing.

Checking State Bar for Red Flags

And what I would be looking for certainly on the internet is going to the state bar website for your state and seeing if there’s a record of discipline, because if there is, that’s a huge red flag. And so I would be checking their license and seeing what they’re posting or other people are posting about them on the internet. That would be one step on definitely the internet search. The website that the lawyer has will be helpful in terms of specialization because if you go on their site and you’re looking, say for divorce attorney, and it says, oh, I do divorce, but I also do criminal defense and personal injury and business disputes, go to the next page. You do not want that lawyer because they’re a generalist and they’re going to be good at nothing. So you want to find somebody who’s dedicated themselves to the area of law that you need help with. So that would be one huge thing to do. Now I have other tips to share here for sure, but my top tip, if we want to just get right to it,

David Chudyk (06:53):

Let’s hear the top tip.

Call High Profile Law Firms for Referrals

Christopher C. Melcher (06:54):

The top tip is find this, go on the internet, do your research, go check with friends, referrals. Identify the most expensive lawyer in town, the most high profile lawyer in town. Call that person’s secretary and say, Hey, I see you’re out here. I admit if you can’t afford that firm, I can’t afford you guys. I’m looking for a top divorce lawyer. I’m looking for a personal injury lawyer. I’m looking for a criminal defense attorney in your community. Could you help me with a referral? These firms like my own, I mean, if we get a hundred calls, we’re going to probably take one or two of those clients. We are super selective on we take, and that means we’re referring everybody else. And that means we already have the referral list. We already know who’s good in these areas and can match people up. We don’t get paid for it. We just like, Hey, we’re not going to be able to help you. But here are a list of people who can, that’s coming from somebody who knows who’s good or bad in your community. So that is my top tip. Go to the most expensive lawyer, tell ’em like, Hey, I don’t want to waste your time, but could you give me a referral? Now you’re getting a referral from a lawyer to another lawyer that is powerful.

David Chudyk (07:48):

So if you’re in small town, USA, not Los Angeles, I mean, do you kind of just generally say, Hey, that guy has the nicest building and he’s probably the most expensive. I mean, how do you know how much an attorney charges?

Christopher C. Melcher (07:57):

And it is hard when the smaller the community, the less chance there’s going to be a specialization and because, so you’re generally going to have people who are going to have multiple practice areas and a smaller community, and that’s fine. Now, certainly, I mean, if the person is successful, they should be busy. And so we do judge some of this. I hate to say that, but I mean lawyers make good money and if they’re successful, they’re going to have a nice office and they’re going to have a nice website and they’re going to have staff answering a phone and being responsive. So these are some ideas because you’re going to spend, I mean, all lawyers are expensive. It doesn’t matter who you hire, they’re all going to charge a lot of money. I mean a stupid amount of money per hour.

Why Lawyers Are So Expensive

David Chudyk (08:33):

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room because as a client you might say, why the heck is this guy charging me so much money? All lawyers are crooks and they just charge too much. So obviously I believe everybody should get paid and everything. And some people may think that my fees are too high. And then are we paying for expertise or why does it need to cost that much?

Christopher C. Melcher (08:47):

I hate it. I hate it. Hate it, hate it. How expensive it is. And for me, I’ll use myself as an example. I’m $850 an hour, and that’s on the low side. I could be a thousand. I could literally charge a thousand dollars an hour for what I’m doing in my area. I cannot afford myself. If, God forbid, my wife left me, I could not afford my own law firm that I’m a co-owner of to represent me. It is that expensive. And how is it that expensive? Well, overhead. We have eight lawyers we got, I mean, could you imagine the payroll that is required to most people can’t afford a lawyer for an hour.

A law firm has to pay the salaries of lawyers for a year, and the office and the malpractice insurance, the admin overhead is on top of that non-billable time. It is an enormous amount of money to run a law firm, and that’s why the hourly rates are high. Now, what we’re seeing though, is firms like mine who have the infrastructure, and we have systems in place. We have the best technology. We invest constantly into our business. We pay our people well. We have lots of staff and that’s why our overhead is so high. But then we see other lawyers who are basically solos who don’t have any infrastructure, don’t have any systems in place, don’t even have an office, don’t even have staff, but they’re charging similar rates.