A lawyer-client relationship is a personal one. In the Dallas / Fort Worth area, like many other large cities in the United States, there are many personal injury and car accident law firms that strive to sign up as many cases as possible. Some of those “high-volume” law firms spend millions of dollars per year in advertising in order to sign up as many as 500 cases per month, or more. Why? Because their revenue is derived from their volume. The more cases they sign up, then the more cases they have a chance to settle. If the case does not settle and a lawsuit must be filed, then you are more likely to be dropped by a high-volume law firm either because their manpower restricts their ability to litigate the case, or they conclude that the case isn’t worth enough to pursue in litigation. So when you decide to hire a high-volume law firm, you should seriously think about where your case fits into the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of other open cases they have.
However, when you decide to hire a lawyer with a smaller case-load, you should expect more personalized service from the very first meeting. Sometimes the attorneys in the high-volume law firms haven’t even met with all the clients much less personally work on all the cases. Rather the cases are mainly handled by the firm’s support staff (ie., investigators, secretaries, paralegals, etc). I cannot tell you how many times I have had people walk into my office after having their cases dropped by a high-volume law firm. Unfortunately, I tend to refuse those cases because they have usually been handled under a different philosophy than my own. When I sign-up a new case, I ask myself this one question: Can I commit to pursuing the case even if I have to file a lawsuit or go to trial? My job is not to prepare a case for a quick and easy settlement. Rather, I view my job as cultivating the case as if I was taking it to trial.