In this new media internet age legal marketing businesses promising discount legal services have been increasingly touted to the general public as a means to cut ever higher attorney fee costs.
The internet has the power to aid the consumer immensely but also carries the ability to manipulate. This is never more accurate than in the proliferation of pre paid legal defense services. A number of my dui clients in increasing numbers have either sought my help or hired me to take over cases inadequately cared for by pre paid legal attorneys in Indiana. Although I have been approached many times by such corporations to handle large volumes of cases outside my focus of dui defense throughout Indiana, I have always declined.
As a general business model pre paid attorney corporations are profit oriented entities that attempt to churn cases in high volume numbers while controlling the costs paid to attorneys that any and all types of legal cases are referred to. Logic dictates that such attorneys who become at the mercy of such a corporation paying substandard legal fees are substandard practitioners in and of themselves.
Pre paid legal defense attorneys in my estimation are often not exclusively defense lawyers at all much less dui defense lawyers in Indiana. Attorneys with practices needing an infusion of clients to sustain them will often be willing to accept any type of case thrown their way by the pre paid corporate entity. The entity may have little concern over the quality of the legal work performed as the attorney will carry their own legal malpractice insurance. From their vantage point as long as an attorney will take all cases given to them at a low fee rate their business model succeeds. Unfortunately, the ultimate recipient of service, the legal client, is too frequently the individual suffering due to inadequate defense counsel attempting to practice in an area of law that is not a specialty.
For certain standard boilerplate type of legal labor such as wills, trusts, bankruptcy forms, etc.. pre paid legal attorneys may be less capable of future harm than in other legal disciplines. For the purpose of this blog I will suggest strongly that the legal discipline of Indiana dui owi defense is not the type of specialized practice that is usually well served by a pre paid general practice lawyer.
When the prospect of incarceration and a criminal record is on the line there are no likely do overs once a criminal case has been concluded. If one is concerned with cost, public defenders may even be preferable than a pre paid lawyer in some circumstances as even the public defender may have more working knowledge of dui defense than the attorney assigned by a pre paid legal corporation.
What’s more, please consider that the fines and court costs potentially imposed within an Indiana dui prosecution can run into the thousands of dollars. Limiting these long term financial costs will almost always be additionally better served by a dui or owi lawyer in Indiana who makes it their exclusive job to achieve both the best legal as well as long term financial savings in this all important specialty of law.
Should an owi arrest strike in Indiana, at the very least your first steps should be to review the accessible information provided and follow up with a free consultation with a qualified dui or owi defense attorney of your choosing who has devoted his or her practice to this ever changing field of law.
