by Kim Russell

Created on: November 15, 2009

From my experience, attorneys can be grouped into two distinct categories: (1) aged, white-haired men; and (2) everyone else. Of course I'm generalizing, and I hope every single aged, white-haired attorney proves me wrong, but, from my experience, these guys come from an era when legalities were a mystery, huge complex conundrums, too delicate for the untrained, and only the wizard (who had attended the sacred and elitist law school on the hill) possessed the elusive knowledge and ability to unravel the legal system, work through all its fogged twists and turns, and safely deliver us to the other side. The white-headed wizards continue on with their successful legal practices usually because of their longtime experience and their well-embedded name in the community. Us mere peasants to tend to blindly follow them as though they were charismatic cult leaders who had cast a spell and convinced everyone to drink the purple kool-aid.

Thankfully, we live in a new time, a time when information and knowledge about virtually all subjects - and certainly about law - is readily available to us through the explosive advancements in technology and information. No longer is there any excuse for anyone with a legal problem to be in the dark or uninformed about their personal and unique legal situation. The bar is replete with young attorneys who cut their baby teeth on this kind of information gathering, and, consequently, understand that if they can figure it out, so can we. To be just, I have met more than my fair share of older attorneys who have also learned out of necessity that the hide-the-ball/great wizard approach no longer works, and have adjusted their approach and now work with their clients, as opposed to leading their clients. A good attorney has a decent mix of both working with and leading their clients.

Let's start with an analogy with which almost all of us have some experience: buying a used car. Finding a good attorney is like buying a used car. Without the proper knowledge, it doesn't matter how many times you look under the hood or kick the tires, you will never know the truth about the car until you dole out the big bucks and drive it for awhile and put some miles on it. Then, too late, the flaws become painfully evident.

Ideally, if you are buying a used car off of a used car lot, the previous owner would be the expert to whom you would turn to get truth about this particular car. Obviously, the previous owner has no interest in whether that car

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